Division  L  A  1  3 
Section  .ft 


C- 


THE  PERMANENT  VALUES 
IN  EDUCATION 


The  truly  great 

Have  all  one  age,  and  from  one  visible  space 
Shed  influence  !  They  both  in  power  and  act 
Are  permanent,  and  Time  is  not  with  them 
Save  as  it  worketh  for  them,  they  in  it. 


Coi.eridg 


191 


THE 

PERMANENT  VALUES 
IN  EDUCATION 

BY 

KENNETH  RICHMOND 

WITH  AN  INTRODUCTION  BY 

A.  CLUTTON-BROCK 


NEW  YORK 

E.  P.  DUTTON  &  COMPANY 
681  FIFTH  AVENUE 


First  Published  igiy 


PRINTED  IN  GREAT  BRITAIN 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Preface . vii 

Introduction  by  A.  Clutton-Brock  .  .  xi 

CHAPTER 

I.  Jewish  and  Greek  Ideals  i 

II.  Roman  and  Medieval  Ideals  .  .  n 

III.  The  Renaissance  ....  23 

IV.  COMENIUS  AND  THE  “  PANSOPHICAL 

Way  ” . 34 

V.  Milton  and  Caste  Education  .  .  46 

VI.  Locke  and  the  Quest  of  Truth  .  58 

VII.  Rousseau  and  Social  Liberty  .  .  68 

VIII.  Pestalozzi’s  Work  ....  78 

IX.  The  Creed  of  Froebel  ...  89 

X.  Herbart  and  the  Exact  Method  .  101 

XI.  Summary . hi 

XII.  Conclusion  :  Education  and  Reality.  124 
Index  ......  135 


PREFACE 


THESE  brief  studies  are  offered  as  hors  d' oeuvres 
for  the  neglected  feast  of  educational  history. 
We  are  perhaps  in  sight  of  the  time,  long  overdue, 
when  teachers  will  have  full  opportunity  and  in¬ 
centive  to  learn  the  elements  of  their  art  before 
they  are  called  to  its  practice  ;  and  when  that  time 
has  come  a  book  of  this  kind  will  be  superseded,  as 
it  ought  to  be  superseded,  by  the  mere  minimum 
of  recollection  that  every  teacher  will  carry  in  his 
own  mind  from  the  historical  side  of  his  training 
in  pedagogy.  Meanwhile,  many  teachers  have 
never  opened  a  book  that  tells  any  part  of  the  in¬ 
spiring  story.  It  is  literally  inspiration,  not  only 
instruction,  of  which  they  deprive  themselves.  It 
might  seem  a  harsh  exaction  to  demand  that  the 
schoolmaster  and  mistress,  when  classes  are  over, 
paper  work  corrected  and  to-morrow’s  lessons  pre¬ 
pared  (if  they  prefer,  with  Thring,  to  give  children 
to  drink  from  a  running  stream,  not  from  a  stagnant 
pool),  should  give  their  hour  of  leisure  to  an  arid 
absorption  in  the  history  of  ideals  ancient  and  out¬ 
worn.  But  the  old  ideals  are  not  outworn  ;  the 

vii 


viii  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


trouble  with  them,  as  Mr.  Chesterton  has  said  of 
the  Christian  ideal,  is  not  that  they  have  been 
tried  and  found  wanting,  but  that  they  have  been 
found  difficult,  and  left  untried.  Their  inspiration 
lies  in  the  hope  that  they  may  yet  be  tried,  and  tried 
effectually. 

The  teacher  who  turns  for  rest  and  refreshment 
at  the  day’s  tired  close  to  the  original  sources  of 
this  inspiration — the  wide  universalism  of  Comenius, 
the  devoted  humanitarianism  of  Pestalozzi,  or  the 
practical  idealism  of  Froebel — will  not  be  disap¬ 
pointed.  It  is  good  to  feel  the  companionship  of 
other  and  greater  teachers  of  the  past  in  one’s 
struggles  with  the  present ;  and  such  companion¬ 
ship  is  of  a  kind  that  gives  hope  and  courage  for 
the  future  in  these  days  when  education  has  every¬ 
thing  to  offer  in  furtherance  of  our  task  of  recon¬ 
struction.  This  little  book  does  not  aspire  to  point 
the  way  of  educational  reconstruction,  but  only 
to  suggest  that  there  are  springs  yet  unexhausted 
from  which  living  water  can  be  drawn  by  the 
educators  of  to-day. 

At  the  same  time  personal  conclusions,  personal 
attempts  at  a  revaluation  of  old  ideals  in  terms  of 
new  conditions,  are  put  forward  here  in  all  their 
probable  crudity.  It  is  of  no  use  to  absorb  even 
yesterday’s  thoughts  without  recasting  them  in 
to-day’s  mould ;  and  ideals  that  have  lain  in 


PREFACE 


IX 


a  state  of  half-suspended  animation  for  centuries 
need  to  be  still  more  carefully  reinterpreted  by  all 
who  study  them.  My  own  reinterpretations  must 
be  regarded  as  sacrifices  upon  the  altar  of  this 
principle.  If  they  are  immature  and  inconclusive, 
they  are  here  to  be  improved  upon. 

It  is  only  fair  to  add  that  they  are  also,  in  the 
main,  subsequent  additions  to  a  series  of  articles 
which  have  appeared  in  The  Times  Educational 
Supplement ,  and  reappear  in  this  extended  form 
by  the  courtesy  of  The  Times.  Anything  inept 
in  my  work  should  be  regarded  as  having 
been  written  outside  the  scrutiny  of  the  Supple¬ 
ment’s  editor,  to  whom  I  am  indebted  not 
only  for  good  editing  and  the  judicious  help 
which  a  few  editors  have  the  ability  and  the 
will  to  give,  but  also  for  the  suggestion  that 
originally  prompted  an  undertaking  full  of  interest 
at  least  for  myself. 

The  debt  which  my  concluding  chapter  owes  to 
Mr.  Clutton-Brock’s  book,  The  Ultimate  Belief,  will 
be  apparent,  most  of  all  to  those  who  have  had 
the  good  fortune  to  read  that  book ;  and  Mr. 
Clutton-Brock  has  added  to  my  obligation  by  con¬ 
senting  to  write  the  introduction  that  follows. 


■ 


INTRODUCTION 


HE  first  thing,  perhaps,  that  will  strike  the 


J-  reader  of  this  book  is  the  fact  that  nearly 
all  the  great  educators,  whether  teachers  them¬ 
selves  or  only  theorists,  have  been  rebels  against 
the  ordinary  education  of  their  time.  It  seemed 
to  them  so  absurd  a  waste  and  perversion  of  human 
faculties  that  most  of  them  could  not  refrain  from 
bad  language  about  it.  Mr.  Richmond  quotes  the 
saying  of  Montaigne  :  “  We  toil  only  to  stuff  the 
memory  and  leave  the  conscience  and  understand¬ 
ing  void.”  Bacon  speaks  of  cobwebs  of  learning, 
admirable  for  the  fineness  of  thread  and  work,  but 
of  no  substance  or  profit.  Milton  says  that  we 
“  hale  and  drag  our  choicest  and  hopefullest  wits 
to  that  asinine  feast  of  sow-thistles  and  brambles 
which  is  commonly  set  before  them  as  all  the  food 
and  entertainment  of  their  tenderest  and  most 
docible  age.”  Pestalozzi  says  that,  after  reading 
Emile,  the  home  as  well  as  the  public  education  of 
the  whole  world,  and  of  all  ranks  of  society,  appeared 
to  him  as  a  crippled  thing.  So  actual  education 
always  has  appeared  to  the  great  educators  ;  and 


XI 


xii  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


one  might  suppose  from  a  hasty  reading  of  Mr. 
Richmond’s  chapters  that  the  history  of  education, 
at  least,  tells  us  only  of  follies  and  crimes.  And  yet 
the  great  educators  themselves,  and  their  fame, 
prove  that  mankind  have  always  had  an  immense 
desire  for  a  better  education  and  an  unfailing  hope 
of  it.  Indeed  there  is  nothing  that  they  are  so 
constantly  sanguine  about,  nothing  that  seems  to 
them  so  bright  in  the  future  and  therefore  so  dull 
in  the  present  and  past.  We  all  desire  better 
things  for  our  children  than  we  have  known  in  our 
own  childhood.  Here  are  the  children  with  the 
future  of  the  world  in  their  hands  ;  are  they  to 
grow  dull,  as  we  have  grown  dull,  by  being  robbed  of 
curiosity  and  desire  in  the  very  process  that  ought 
to  fill  them  with  these  things  ?  All  through  the 
ages,  no  doubt,  parents  have  looked  at  the  bright 
faces  of  their  children  and  have  sworn  to  themselves 
that  that  brightness  shall  not  be  dimmed  by  the 
schoolmaster.  And  yet  there  is  something  in  these 
very  parents  which  makes  them  consent,  generation 
after  generation,  to  this  same  dimming  process  ; 
and  the  schoolmaster  protests  that,  where  he  fails, 
it  is  because  he  obeys  the  parent’s  will.  But  for  the 
parents,  he  says,  he  could  make  education  what  it 
ought  to  be. 

There  is  clearly  some  malign  force  in  parents  or 
in  schoolmasters,  or  in  both,  which  constantly 


INTRODUCTION 


xi  11 

perverts  all  their  desires  and  efforts,  which  makes 
the  schoolmaster  a  byword  to  the  parent  and  the 
parent  a  byword  to  the  schoolmaster  ;  but  what 
is  it  ?  We  may  search  through  Mr.  Richmond’s 
work  for  this  force  as  well  as  for  those  permanent 
values  which  it  seems  so  constantly  to  obscure  ; 
and  I  think  we  shall  find  it,  as  persistent  as  those 
values  themselves. 

The  great  educators  always  tell  us  that  we  must 
appeal  to  the  child’s  own  sense  of  absolute  values ; 
for  that  sense  is  in  the  child,  and  it  is  the  same  in 
all  children,  though  it  may  vary  in  strength.  It  is 
the  common  faith  of  all  great  educators  that  abso¬ 
lute  values  are  always  of  the  same  nature  in  all 
human  beings.  That  faith  is  the  reason  why  they 
are  educators,  why  education  seems  to  them  the 
most  interesting  thing  in  the  world.  Mr.  Richmond, 
for  instance,  quotes  the  saying  of  Locke  that 
children  “  have  as  much  a  mind  to  shew  that  they 
are  free  ;  that  their  good  actions  come  from  them¬ 
selves  ...  as  any  of  the  proudest  of  you  grown 
men.”  The  aim  of  education,  for  Locke  and  for  all 
the  great  educators,  is  to  give  the  child  that  free¬ 
dom  of  the  spirit  which  can  only  come  with  obedi¬ 
ence  to  the  sense  of  absolute  values,  to  his,  the 
child’s  own  sense  and  not  to  his  teacher’s.  The 
child  must  know  that  his  good  actions  come  from 
himself,  if  they  are  to  be  to  him  good  actions.  But, 


xiv  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


though  the  parent  and  the  schoolmaster  may  desire 
this  freedom  for  the  child,  there  is  something  in 
both  which  makes  them  fear  this  freedom  ;  and 
both  teach  the  child  himself  to  be  afraid  of  it. 
What  is  the  cause  of  this  fear  ? 

It  is  not  merely  the  vulgar  will  to  power  over 
the  child,  but  something  far  subtler  and  more  un¬ 
conscious.  It  is  their  constant  tendency  to  associate 
education  with  status,  to  regard  it  as  a  means,  not 
to  freedom  of  the  spirit  but  to  some  kind  of 
superiority.  The  education  of  the  Jew,  for  instance, 
was  based  upon  the  belief  that  the  Jews  were  the 
chosen  people  of  God  and  superior  in  righteousness 
to  all  other  peoples.  It  was  an  education  which 
inevitably  led  to  self-righteousness,  as  we  see  in 
the  case  of  the  Pharisee  who  thanked  God  that 
he  was  not  as  other  men.  Then  Mr.  Richmond 
summarizes  Xenophon’s  account  of  the  education  of 
the  Persians  :  “  Keep  youth  fit,  and  active,  and 
honourable,  and  nothing  else  is  of  great  account.” 
That  was  the  education  of  a  conquering  race.  It 
taught  the  boy  to  take  a  pride  in  those  qualities 
which  marked  him  as  a  member  of  that  race.  It 
appealed  to  the  sense  of  honour  ;  and  honour  is 
always  associated  with  status.  It  is  the  form  which 
the  moral  sense  takes  in  those  who  feel  themselves 
to  be  members  of  a  superior  class.  This  Persian 
education,  as  Mr,  Richmond  says,  was  in  its  aims 


INTRODUCTION 


xv 


very  like  the  education  of  our  own  public  schools. 
It  was  fine  so  far  as  it  went ;  but  it  did  not  go  far 
enough,  and  it  must  very  easily  have  declined  into 
an  encouragement  of  certain  kinds  of  stupidity.  If 
a  Persian  had  the  sense  of  honour  and  obeyed  it  we 
may  guess  there  was  no  need  for  him  to  think  much, 
least  of  all  to  criticize  the  results  of  his  sense  of 
honour  in  action.  It  must  be  right  because  it  was 
the  morality  of  his  own  superior  class  ;  and  if  it 
were  not  right  then  his  class  would  not  be  superior. 

So  status  always  robs  those  who  are  keenly  aware 
of  it  of  their  critical  faculty  ;  their  egotism  is  en¬ 
listed  on  the  side  of  their  education,  and  they  prize 
their  education  with  the  blindness  of  self-love. 
Greek  education,  except  the  education  of  the 
Spartans,  must  have  been  much  freer  from  the 
sense  of  status  than  Persian  ;  and  yet  it  too  was 
the  education  of  a  superior  people  constantly  aware 
of  their  intellectual  and  aesthetic  superiority. 
Aristotle’s  ideal  man  is  what  we  should  call  a 
superior  person,  and  his  whole  system  of  behaviour 
is  based  upon  his  sense  of  his  own  superiority.  In 
his  own  way,  a  more  intelligent  way,  he  is  a  Pharisee, 
and  one  can  see  that  he  might  easily  become 
a  pedant.  So  the  whole  education  of  the  Roman 
Empire,  an  education  based  in  the  main  upon  Greek 
principles,  became  more  and  more  pedantic.  What 
is  it  that  leaves  us  a  little  cold  in  the  Meditations 


xvi  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


of  Marcus  Aurelius  ?  It  is  the  fact  that  this  lofty 
Stoic  morality  of  his  is  inspired  by  the  sense  of  its 
own  loftiness.  It  is  purified  of  all  the  more  vulgar 
kinds  of  status.  The  Emperor  is  not  proud  of  being 
an  Emperor,  or  a  Roman,  or  an  Aristocrat  ;  but  he 
is  proud  of  being  a  Stoic.  As  a  Stoic  he  must  be 
kind  and  forbearing  to  all  men  ;  but  only  because 
he  is  a  Stoic  and  has  a  wisdom  which  they  do  not 
possess.  Lucian  in  that  Dialogue  of  his  in  which  he 
puts  all  the  philosophers  up  to  auction  treats  the 
Stoic  with  more  respect  than  most  of  them.  But 
he  makes  the  Auctioneer  proclaim  that  the  Stoic 
is  the  only  just  and  wise  man  ;  and  the  Stoic  in  his 
satire  is,  as  we  should  say,  a  little  Bethellite.  That 
is  his  weak  point,  which  Lucian,  the  universal 
sceptic,  ridicules  ;  and  through  this  weak  point  he 
fell  easily  into  pedantry. 

Christianity  made  a  direct  attack  upon  all  sense 
of  status,  yet  it  could  not  free  the  education  of  the 
Roman  empire  of  Pedantry  ;  and  even  St.  Augus¬ 
tine  thought  that  the  style  of  the  Gospels  was  bad. 
A  Christian  might  condemn  all  culture  as  Pagan  ; 
he  did  not  make  the  deadlier  attack  upon  the  culture 
of  his  time  that  it  was  no  longer  culture  because  it 
was  pedantic.  He  did  not  see  that  Christianity,  if 
all  its  principles  were  acted  upon,  meant  a  new  life 
to  culture  itself,  a  new  sense  of  adventure  and  beauty 
which  must  produce  great  art  and  literature  and 


INTRODUCTION  xvii 

philosophy.  And  we  have  not  seen  this  even  to 
the  present  day.  We  still  appeal  to  one  sense  of 
status  or  another  in  our  education,  and  in  that 
appeal  we  are  constantly  falling  into  one  kind  of 
pedantry  or  another. 

Why,  for  instance,  is  it  that  the  well-to-do  have 
so  long  submitted  to  the  manner  in  which  Greek 
and  Latin  are  taught  in  most  of  our  public  schools  ? 
They  complain  but  they  do  not  rebel ;  and  the 
reason  clearly  is  that  they  believe  Greek  and  Latin, 
as  they  are  taught,  to  be  part  of  the  education  of  a 
gentleman.  A  public  school  boy  may  not  learn  to 
read  either  language,  with  ease  or  pleasure.,  after  five 
years  of  teaching  ;  but  he  does  learn  not  to  make 
a  false  quantity,  and  we  are  all  agreed  that  a  false 
quantity  is  the  mark  of  a  socially  inferior  education. 
Those  who  do  not  make  false  quantities  belong  to 
one  class,  and  those  who  do  make  them  belong  to 
another.  It  is  a  test  more  exclusive  than  the 
dropping  of  an  “  H.”  But  if  our  education  were 
emptied  of  the  sense  of  status  we  should  not  be 
content  with  this  avoidance  of  false  quantities  as 
the  result  of  five  years  of  teaching  ;  and  we  should 
see  that  it  is  an  absurd  pedantry  to  be  proud  of  it. 
Education,  in  fact,  is  not  a  thing  to  be  proud  of  at 
all.  One  of  the  first  aims  of  education  should  be  to 
remove  all  pride  in  it.  The  better  a  man  is  educated, 
morally,  intellectually,  and  aesthetically,  the  less 
b 


xviii  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


proud  he  is  of  what  he  knows  ;  for  the  result  of  his 
education  is  to  give  him  a  thirst  for  knowledge  and 
for  doing  all  things  rightly,  in  which  he  forgets  to 
pride  himself  on  what  he  knows  or  on  what  he  does 
rightly  ;  forgets  himself  and  his  own  achievements 
altogether.  He,  himself,  exists  only  in  a  certain 
relation  with  the  universe  outside  him  ;  he  opens 
out  to  all  that  is  good  or  true  or  beautiful  as  a  plant 
opens  out  to  the  sun  ;  and  the  proper  aim  of  educa¬ 
tion  is  to  make  men  open  out  thus,  forgetting  them¬ 
selves  and  their  own  status  in  the  warmth  and  light 
of  their  fellowship  with  the  universe  outside  them. 

But  education  cannot  achieve  this  aim,  or  even 
possess  it,  if  it  appeals  to  any  sense  of  status  in  the 
pupil.  Mr.  Richmond  speaks  of  the  wider  ideal  of 
Comenius,  which  was  also  shared  by  Pestalozzi,  the 
ideal  of  education  “  as  the  service  of  humanity,  not 
merely  as  the  culture  of  a  superior  caste,  which 
sufficed  for  the  educational  idealism  of  Milton  and 
Locke.”  Pestalozzi  wished  all  children  to  be  edu¬ 
cated,  not  merely  that  they  might  "  do  their  duty 
in  that  state  of  life  to  which  it  should  please  God  to 
call  them,”  but  so  that  they  might  be  fully  developed 
human  beings.  The  child  was  to  him  a  child  and 
not  a  member  of  some  particular  class  ;  and  so  it 
has  been  with  all  the  great  modern  educators  who 
have  followed  him.  They  have  been  freed  from 
pedantry  because  they  have  been  freed  from  the 


INTRODUCTION 


xix 


sense  of  status.  The  Kindergarten,  said  Froebel, 
is  the  free  republic  of  childhood.  It  would  be  im¬ 
possible  to  base  Froebel’s  principles  upon  any  sense 
of  status  whatever.  He  believed  in  the  free  activity 
of  the  child’s  mind  and  in  an  incessant  appeal  to 
that  activity.  Education  for  him  was  a  means  of 
achieving  freedom,  a  freedom  from  that  conflict  in 
the  mind  which  is  itself  slavery,  because  it  is  im¬ 
potence.  But  he  further  believed  that  this  freedom 
ought  to  be  attained  to  by  all  human  beings  ;  and  it 
can  only  be  so  attained  to  if  all  human  beings  wish 
to  attain  to  it  in  common.  As  soon  as  it  is  regarded 
as  a  privilege  of  some  one  class,  superior  either  in 
birth,  in  riches  or  in  culture,  it  cannot  be  attained 
to  at  all,  for  the  very  sense  of  superiority  is  itself  a 
slavery.  The  individual  who  belongs  to  the  superior 
class  and  whose  morality  is  based  on  his  sense  of 
superiority,  is  the  slave  of  his  class.  He  submits  to 
its  ideas  so  that  he  may  feel  superior,  and  not  to 
the  voice  of  his  own  conscience.  It  is  the  faith  of 
all  great  educators  that  conscience  in  all  men  is 
the  same,  so  far  as  it  really  is  conscience  and  the 
inner  voice.  But  when  it  is  an  outer  voice,  then  it  is 
subject  to  the  differences  of  class  or  nationality.  It 
is  something  which  does  not  speak  in  a  man’s  own 
mind,  something  rather  which  is  spoken  to  that 
mind  and  obeyed  from  cowardice  or  pride.  And 
this  obedience,  so  far  from  being  education,  is  the 


XX  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


very  opposite  of  it.  For  it  enslaves  the  mind  rather 
than  frees  it ;  enslaves  it  intellectually  no  less  than 
morally.  It  imposes  a  uniformity  rather  than  dis¬ 
covers  that  unity  which  is  in  the  minds  of  all  men  ; 
imposes  a  set  of  values  which  are  local  and  tem¬ 
porary  rather  than  leads  men  to  discover  those 
values  which  are  universal  and  everlasting. 

Always,  as  I  have  said,  education  has  been 
hampered  by  this  sense  of  status ;  always  the 
theories  of  the  great  educators  have  been  more  or 
less  perverted  in  practice,  because  there  never  has 
been  a  general  desire  in  any  society  for  equality  of 
education.  The  arguments  against  it  are  very 
plausible.  It  is  obviously  absurd  to  attempt  to 
educate  the  peasant  in  just  the  same  way  as  the 
peer.  Pestalozzi  insisted,  as  Mr.  Richmond  points 
out,  that  “  popular  education  must  take  the  life  of 
the  people  where  it  finds  it,  and,  in  awakening  and 
developing  the  minds  of  children,  must  keep  them 
in  touch  with  the  domestic  realities  among  which 
they  are  growing  up.”  Indeed  the  very  effort  to 
educate  them  above  those  realities  is  itself  the 
result  of  a  sense  of  status.  It  is  an  effort  to  make 
them  fit  for  a  superior  class,  not  to  improve  the  life 
of  that  class  to  which  they  belong.  To  despair  of 
the  common  people,  to  establish  a  system  of  educa¬ 
tion  which  offers  to  the  cleverest  children  a  chance 
of  escaping  from  their  own  class,  that  is  only  the 


INTRODUCTION 


xxi 


pedantic  madness  produced  by  the  sense  of  status. 
What  we  need  is  an  education  that  will  enrich  the 
life  of  all  classes,  of  the  poor  and  stupid  no  less  than 
of  the  rich  and  clever  ;  and  we  cannot  aim  at  such 
an  education,  or  even  conceive  it,  unless  we  empty 
our  minds  of  the  sense  of  status,  and  of  intellectual 
no  less  than  of  social  status.  There  must  be  peasants 
and  we  need  an  education  that  will  teach  them  to 
be  good  peasants  and  will  give  them  a  chance  of 
enjoying  the  peasant  life.  Such  an  education  we 
cannot  provide  unless  we  cease  altogether  to  despise 
peasants,  to  regard  the  peasant  lot  as  the  penalty 
of  stupidity  from  which  the  cleverer  children  of 
the  peasant  class  can  be  encouraged  to  escape.  The 
brotherhood  of  the  whole  nation,  that  is  what  we 
should  aim  at  in  our  education,  and  we  cannot  aim 
at  it  unless  we  rid  ourselves  of  our  own  sense  of 
status.  If  we  despise  the  peasant,  we  shall  teach 
him  to  despise  his  own  lot,  however  artfully  we  may 
conceal  our  contempt  from  him.  And  in  despising 
him  or  any  other  class,  we  shall  pervert  our  educa¬ 
tion  no  less  than  his. 

We  are  always  talking  about  the  minds  of  those 
who  are  to  be  educated,  but  in  doing  so  we  are  apt 
to  forget  the  mind  of  the  educator.  Yet  every 
weakness  in  his  mind,  every  wrong  idea  that  he 
has  absorbed  from  his  surroundings,  is  sure  to 
betray  itself  in  his  teaching.  It  is  not  enough  that 


xxii  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

he  shall  know  facts  accurately  or  shall  be  able  to 
impart  them.  If  he  has  himself  any  sense  of  status, 
whether  social  or  intellectual,  he  will  impart  it  also 
like  a  poison  to  his  pupils.  The  stupid  ones  he  will 
make  conscious  of  their  stupidity,  the  clever  he  will 
make  dangerously  conscious  of  their  cleverness ; 
and  inevitably  he  will  value  most  the  kind  of  facul¬ 
ties  which  he  himself  possesses.  So  a  pedant  or  a 
prig  will  train  some  of  his  pupils  into  pedants  or 
prigs  and  others  into  a  blind  rebellion  against  his 
pedantry  or  priggishness.  That  is  how  the  sense  of 
intellectual  status  works  and  has  worked  all  through 
the  ages.  It  raises  the  same  prejudice  against 
education  as  is  raised  by  the  self-righteous  against 
religion.  But,  as  true  religion  destroys  self- 
righteousness,  so  true  education  destroys  the  sense 
of  status,  and  particularly  of  intellectual  status. 
The  pedant  and  the  prig  are  men  who  have  had  a 
wrong  education,  as  the  Pharisee  is  one  who  has  a 
wrong  religion.  By  their  fruits  ye  shall  know  them  ; 
and  humility  is  the  fruit  of  true  education  as  of 
true  religion. 

Since  Mr.  Richmond  has  said  so  much  in  this 
book  about  the  positive  side  of  education,  since  he 
has  traced  the  main  ideas  which  have  given  life 
to  it  all  through  the  ages,  I  may  be  excused  perhaps 
for  speaking  of  those  errors  which  have  deadened 
it  all  through  the  ages.  The  great  negative  task 


INTRODUCTION 


XXlll 


for  us  now  is  to  rid  our  education,  for  all  classes, 
of  this  sense  of  status.  Our  ideal  must  be  to  educate 
all  as  men  and  women,  as  members  of  the  nation, 
so  that  all  may  be  able  to  enjoy  the  fulness  of  that 
life  which  the  nation  offers  to  its  children.  If  we 
have  that  purpose  we  shall  communicate  it  also  to 
those  whom  we  teach  ;  our  whole  education  will  be 
quickened  by  it,  and  we  shall  find  a  new  meaning 
in  the  words,  "  Inasmuch  as  ye  have  done  it  unto 
one  of  these  little  ones  ye  have  done  it  unto  Me.” 


A.  CLUTTON-BROCK. 


THE  PERMANENT  VALUES 
IN  EDUCATION 


I 


JEWISH  AND  GREEK  IDEALS 


HE  stirring  of  a  new  sense  of  educational  re- 


J-  sponsibility,  in  these  days  so  strongly  felt  by 
all  who  are  laying  to  heart  the  lessons  of  Europe’s 
catastrophe,  makes  increasingly  urgent  the  need 
for  a  unified  body  of  educational  doctrine.  Diver- 
sity  of  aim  and  method  has  been  not  the  least  vital 
factoi  in  the  very  real  and  enheartening  progress  of 
recent  years  ;  but  the  need  for  a  realized  unity  in 
diversity,  nay,  more,  for  an  organized  unity,  is 
becoming  more  and  more  articulate  as  we  look 
forward  into  times  that  will  call  aloud  for  a  genera¬ 
tion  united  in  thoughtful  citizenship  and  in  en¬ 
lightened  goodwill.  We  are  all  aware  that  the 
approach  to  unity  must  be  spontaneous  and  general 
if  it  is  to  be  real.  Organization  in  such  a  cause  as 
ours  must  be  no  cut-and-dried  system,  but  the  ex¬ 
pression  of  a  continually  developing  impulse  to 
unify  and  co-ordinate  our  ideals  ;  and  we  all  feel  it 


B 


2  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

a  duty  to  reach  out  and  come  into  touch  with  the 
general  aspiration — to  become  ourselves  better 
citizens  of  the  educational  world. 

In  the  general  search  for  unifying  principles  we 
may  be  sure  that  one  mode  of  mutual  approach 
will  be  of  constant  and  unique  value  :  the  seeking 
out  of  permanent  educational  truths  that  have 
vindicated  their  position  in  the  past.  Many  such 
truths  we  can  trace,  unchanged  despite  all  differ¬ 
ences  in  their  application,  down  to  a  definite  place 
among  the  realized  principles  of  our  own  day. 
Others  we  may  find  to  have  fallen  into  neglect  ; 
and  it  may  well  be  that  some  of  these  half-forgotten 
truths  will  prove  capable  of  bridging  the  gaps,  or 
penetrating  the  barriers,  that  divide  one  realized 
educational  principle  from  another  and  so  give  rise 
to  unnecessary  divergences  of  theory.  It  is  with 
the  hope  of  making  some  small  contribution  to  a 
general  synthesis  of  opinion  that  certain  ideals  of 
bygone  civilizations  and  of  the  great  educators  of 
the  past  will  be  traced,  in  this  and  succeeding 
chapters,  with  regard  to  the  educational  questions 
that  confront  us  now  and  for  the  future. 

Let  us  start  with  a  single  instance,  one  of  the 
most  awkwardly  two-edged  questions  that  confront 
us  when  we  think  of  the  work  that  education  has 
to  do  for  the  cause  of  the  world’s  peace  in  the  future. 
It  is  a  question  that  finds  an  immediate  if  only  a 
partial  answer  in  the  example  of  one  of  the  peoples 
in  the  past.  Our  present  desire  is  to  train  up  a 


3 


JEWISH  AND  GREEK  IDEALS 

generation  whose  life  and  hope  need  not  be  sacri- 
ficially  poured  out  in  the  heroic  prosecution  of  war, 
but  may  be  turned  to  the  wise  maintenance  of  the 
peace  that  has  her  victories  no  less  renowned  ;  and 
the  desire  brings  us  to  a  whole  series  of  dilemmas, 
all  part  of  the  age-long  paradox  of  war,  with  its 
heroisms  and  its  horrors. 

We  face  perhaps  the  most  obvious  dilemma  that 
is  before  us  when  we  ask  what  outlook  upon  war 
itself  and  upon  preparedness  for  war  is  to  be 
fostered  in  the  minds  of  the  young.  Is  the  word  to 
be  Arm  or  Disarm  ?  Put  in  these  terms  the  anti- 
tithesis  seems  complete  ;  no  middle  course  appears. 
Yet  either  precept  carries  its  inevitable  peril.  Both 
principles  leave  out  some  essential  safeguard  ;  both 
have  that  flavour  of  plausible  onesidedness  which 
characterizes  a  half-truth.  To  rearm  is  to  pile  up 
new  potential  for  another  orgy  of  destruction.  To 
disarm  is  to  surrender  national  vitality,  strength 
of  purpose  and  power  for  good,  to  a  lax  fatalism 
that  might  well  invite  the  obliteration  of  our  value 
among  the  civilizing  forces  of  the  world.  It  is  a 
very  real  dilemma,  and  its  solution  is  not  to  be 
found  in  any  immediate,  easy  formula.  But  we 
can  begin  by  casting  back  to  see  what  efforts  have 
been  made  by  peoples  in  the  past  to  combine  the 
ideal  of  a  purposeful  vitality,  strong  to  resist  any 
suppression  of  its  essential  character,  with  the  con¬ 
trasted  ideal  of  peaceful  progress  towards  higher 
civilization,  avoiding  conflict  and  all  the  waste  and 


4  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

wrong  and  horror  that  conflict  involves.  To  take 
the  earliest  of  such  peoples  whose  history  is  on 
record,  we  find  the  problem  continually  to  the  fore, 
in  a  crude  and  simple  form,  in  the  early  story  of  the 
Jewish  race.  Here  are  warriors  who  could  fight 
grimly  and  nobly,  yet  whose  ideal  was  to  keep 
clear  of  conflict  and  of  the  warring  powers  around 
them.  Their  outlook  so  far  justified  itself  that 
they  excelled  in  civilization — if  by  civilization  we 
mean  the  development  of  high  human  quality — 
all  the  great  contemporary  nations  ;  and  not  only 
excelled,  but  survived  them.  What  was  the  essen¬ 
tial  feature  of  the  paternal  or  the  priest-given 
education  of  the  Jew  ?  What  must  have  been  at 
the  root  of  the  teaching  in  those  early  Hebrew 
universities,  the  schools  of  the  prophets,  unique 
training  grounds  of  wisdom  and  inspiration,  of 
which  the  Old  Testament  gives  us  so  tantalizing 
a  glimpse  ?  We  might  define  it,  for  our  purpose,  as 
the  inculcation  of  a  supreme  sense  of  the  national 
conscience  as  residing  in  the  individual.  Some  such 
sense  has  been  known  to  us,  in  vague  and  childish 
form,  perhaps,  in  the  esprit  de  corps  of  a  public 
school  or  a  regiment ;  nationally  we  have  known 
it  all  too  little.  The  Prussian  system,  on  the  other 
hand,  inculcates  the  exact  opposite  :  a  blind  sub¬ 
servience  to  a  conscienceless  spirit  of  national  self- 
aggrandizement.  To  any  such  spirit  we  may 
oppose,  if  we  learn  from  the  Jewish  nation  at  its 
best,  not  the  mere  absence  of  a  like  evil  in  our  own 


JEWISH  AND  GREEK  IDEALS  5 

midst,  but  the  positive  development  of  the  nation’s 
conscience,  in  microcosm,  in  every  individual. 
Armed  avowedly  and  manifestly  for  conscience 
sake,  and  on  the  sole  ground  that  conscience  un¬ 
armed  is  not  yet  safe  in  an  imperfect  world,  a 
nation  has  adopted  a  principle  which,  once  recog¬ 
nized,  disarms  the  jealousy  and  mistrust  that  attend 
a  blind  accumulation  of  power. 

But  although  the  Jews  realized  this  principle  in 
part,  their  own  story  shows  how  easily  they  could 
forget  it  and  run  after  the  gods  of  power  for  power’s 
sake.  Their  prophets  taught  not  wholly  but  largely 
in  vain.  We  shall  have  to  consider  in  this  survey 
of  education  not  only  the  teaching  of  principles, 
but  also  the  principles  of  teaching,  which  involve 
the  turning  of  the  ideal  into  the  real,  so  that  a  right 
feeling  may  find  anchorage  in  reality,  and  so  be 
able  to  express  itself  consistently  and  increasingly 
in  right  action.  But  this  is  a  theme  for  later  con¬ 
sideration  ;  our  first  purpose  is  to  elicit  a  few 
general  ideals  ;  and  the  Jewish  thought  of  self  and 
society  as  a  union  having  one  conscience  and  one 
responsibility  is  carried  as  deep  in  the  great  litera¬ 
ture  of  the  prophets  as  the  related  thought  of  the 
union  of  both  society  and  self  with  the  will  of  God. 

We  may  contrast  with  such  an  educational  ideal 
the  spirit  fostered  in  one  at  least  of  the  civilizations 
contemporary  with  the  Jews,  as  that  civilization  is 
described  by  a  Greek  soldier-chronicler.  Xeno¬ 
phon’s  account  of  Persian  education  can  hardly  be 


6  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

taken  as  simple  reporting  without  ulterior  motive  ; 
he  seems  to  idealize  it  somewhat,  being  anxious  to 
commend  its  simplicities  to  the  sophisticated  Greeks 
of  his  time  ;  but  the  Persian  system,  with  Xeno¬ 
phon’s  bias  all  in  its  favour,  comes  down  to  us  as 
having  its  roots  in  a  shallow  principle.  The  interest 
of  this  is  that  it  singularly  resembles  a  principle 
still  of  wide  acceptance  and  sufficiency  among  oui- 
selves.  Keep  youth  fit,  and  active,  and  honourable, 
and  nothing  else  is  of  great  account  ;  that  is  the 
prevailing  note.  The  principle  cannot  be  ques¬ 
tioned  in  respect  of  its  admirable  positive  content ; 
its  peril  is  on  the  negative  side,  in  the  many  things 
that  it  deliberately  leaves  out.  It  sufficed  to  grow 
human  material  for  the  building  of  a  Persian  em¬ 
pire,  great  and  largely  good  ;  it  did  not  suffice  to 
preserve  the  empire  and  the  material  from  decay. 
Fitness  and  activity,  alone,  can  build,  but  they 
cannot  rightly  enjoy— there  supervenes  a  kind  of 
fatty  degeneration  of  the  spirit.  A  code  of  honour 
left  too  much  in  vacuo  is  all  too  vulnerable  in  the 
later  years.  What  were  the  things  that  the  Persian 
system  left  out  ?  For  a  partial  answer  we  may 
turn  to  Greek  education. 

To  simplify  very  crudely  a  highly  complex 
phenomenon,  we  may  say  that  the  keynote  of  Greek 
education  at  its  best  is  a  great  and  a  pure  aesthetic. 
The  Greeks  did  know  how  to  enjoy  ;  even  those  of 
the  stoic  reaction,  who  saw  the  danger  of  caring 
overmuch  for  the  enjoyments  of  the  senses,  turned 


JEWISH  AND  GREEK  IDEALS  7 

only  to  a  remoter  and  a  subtler  aestheticism.  The 
Greek  system  superadded  to  a  more  than  Persian 
code  of  fitness  and  honour  a  great  faculty  for 
fruition.  It  may  be  said  that  the  ultimate  and 
terrible  decline  of  the  Greek  worship  of  beauty, 
moral,  intellectual,  and  physical,  cast  Hellenism  in 
the  eyes  of  Rome,  and  so,  later,  of  Christendom, 
under  a  cloud  from  which  it  has  never  fully  emerged. 
The  true  Hellenism  has  never  yet  come  back  into 
its  own,  as  we  feel  whenever  we  look  at  a  Greek 
statue  ;  and  if  the  civilization  of  to-day  is  sick  and 
ugly  and  restless  with  materialism,  it  is  largely  for 
lack  of  that  high  power  of  fruition. 

There  is  an  urgency  in  healthy  mankind  to  make 
and  make,  come  what  will  of  the  making.  At  times 
the  activity  seems  to  be  no  higher  than  that  of  bees 
in  a  hive  who,  industrialized  by  the  modern  bee¬ 
keeper,  go  on  making  more  and  more  honey  in 
excess  of  their  possible  needs,  knowing  not  at  all 
what  happens  to  the  surplus.  So  it  was  in  a  measure 
for  one  stratum  of  the  Greek  community — the 
slaves,  to  whose  importance  in  the  Greek  scheme  of 
things  we  must  presently  look  back ;  but  of  the 
polity  of  Greek  freemen  it  is  broadly  true  to  say 
that  it  possessed  one  indispensable  inspiration  that 
preserves  the  works  of  man  from  degenerating  into 
a  mere  aimless,  unhappy  agglomeration  of  the 
wealth  that  Ruskin  called  “  illth  ”  and  of  the  power 
that  is  only  a  peril.  The  Greeks  made  beauty,  not 
in  a  few  but  in  all  their  works,  from  sculpture  and 


8  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


poetic  drama  to  athleticism,  from  philosophy  to 
politics  ;  and  they  made  it  because  they  wanted  it. 
The  desire  that  went  to  the  making  became  the 
joy  of  fruition  in  achievement,  and  from  that  joy 
in  turn  sprang  fresh  desire,  so  long  as  Greece  was 
healthy  and  made  joy  an  active  and  creative,  not 
a  passive  and  consumptive,  factor  in  life. 

How  the  desire  arose,  unless  it  is  native  to  the 
human  spirit,  it  is  impossible  to  say.  How  it  grew 
and  extended  was  by  the  continual  impulse  to  new 
expression  and  new  fruition.  How  the  achievement 
of  each  generation  was  handed  down  to  the  next 
through  the  educational  system — apart  from  the 
sense  in  which  all  Greece  was  in  itself  an  educational 
system — is  well  told  in  the  late  Mr.  Kenneth  Free¬ 
man’s  book,  Schools  of  Hellas.  Our  concern  here  is 
rather  with  the  aesthetic  principle  as  a  value  that  has 
permanent  significance  in  education.  Is  it  possible 
that  Greece  was  wrong  ?  Greece  fell ;  was  the  fall 
because  of,  or  in  spite  of,  the  aesthetic  principle  ? 
To  compare  our  own  systems  with  the  Hellenic 
it  would  almost  seem  as  though  we  had  decided 
upon  the  former  opinion.  It  is  easy,  by  a  simple 
confusion  of  mind,  to  drift  into  the  belief  that  a 
sense  of  beauty  is  a  very  good  thing  in  moderation, 
but  that  too  much  of  it  is  dangerous.  The  good  sense 
that  lurks  in  this  belief  depends  upon  a  loose  em¬ 
ployment  of  the  term  “  too  much  ” — a  purely  rela¬ 
tive  term  that  is  often  used,  to  save  thinking,  as 
though  it  meant  something  in  itself.  A  very  little 


JEWISH  AND  GREEK  IDEALS  9 

thought  brings  conviction  that  it  is  impossible  to 
have  too  much  sense  of  beauty,  but  that  it  is 
entirely  possible  to  lack  the  other  principles  which 
can  preserve  an  intense  feeling  for  the  beautiful 
upon  the  pathway  of  high  aspiration,  and  keep  the 
way  of  hedonistic  degeneracy  closed. 

For  a  long  time  Hellenism  kept  its  poise  and  pro¬ 
portion — for  long  enough  to  build  up  a  standard  of 
human  living  that  has  in  many  ways  been  unap¬ 
proached  and  unapproachable  ever  since.  It  turned 
the  high  achievement  of  Greece  in  that  friendly 
conquest  of  nature — including  human  nature — 
which  is  called  civilization,  into  an  exemplary  work 
of  art — of  that  true  art  which  is  the  harmonious  re¬ 
interpretation  of  Nature.  If  Hellenism,  conserving 
for  a  time  and  marvellously  embellishing  what 
Greece  had  won,  could  not  in  the  end  conserve  itself, 
the  cause  must  surely  be  sought  not  in  any  taint 
inherent  in  beauty,  but  in  the  lack  of  some  other 
principles  of  permanence  that  must  be  the  object 
of  our  further  quest. 

Meanwhile,  is  it  idle  to  talk  of  beauty  when  the 
thought  at  the  back  of  our  minds  is  the  rebuilding 
of  a  shattered  Europe  ?  There  is  no  good  building 
without  beauty,  whether  we  speak  of  architecture 
or  of  the  structures  of  spirit.  And  to  revert  for  a 
moment  to  the  Jewish  ideal,  can  the  union  of  self 
and  society  in  a  State  that  has  both  consciousness 
and  conscience  be  achieved  in  a  civilization  which 
disregards  beauty  ?  There  is  a  danger  that  educa- 


10  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


lion  may  neglect  beauty  in  the  interests  of  stern 
reality,  just  as  there  has  been  a  danger  that  the 
State  might  neglect  education,  which  is  economy, 
in  the  interests  of  economy.  Little  doubt  will  be 
left  whether  this  investigation  of  ours  leads  to 
reality  in  education.  The  doubt  that  needs  to  be 
raised  is  whether  reality  can  be  found  without 
invoking  the  spirit  of  Praxiteles  as  well  as  of  Isaiah. 
And  those  whose  only  watchward  is  economy  might 
be  attracted  by  the  suggestion  that,  aiming  at 
beauty  in  simplification,  we  should  economize  in 
unnecessary  ugliness. 


II 


ROMAN  AND  MEDIEVAL  IDEALS 


E  have  seen  that  the  unique  faculty  of 


V  V  fruition  developed  by  the  Greeks  did  not 
suffice  to  conserve  their  civilization.  Something 
gave  way.  A  lesion  appeared  in  the  Greek  organism. 
We  all  know  why,  if  we  are  content  with  a  negative 
explanation  :  Greek  civilization  was  founded,  eco¬ 
nomically,  upon  slavery.  The  crude,  indispensable 
physical  ultimates  of  social  life  were  the  hopeless 
privilege  of  slaves  ;  while  the  masters  of  Greece, 
the  initiate  of  her  mysteries,  became  divorced  in 
increasing  measure  from  reality,  and  their  aesthetic 
attainment  became  an  accelerating  landslide  into 
eroticism.  The  Greek  joy  in  beauty  lost  its  creative¬ 
ness  ;  the  impulse  to  make,  which  is  nothing  if  it 
is  not  also  the  impulse  to  serve,  faded  from  a  social 
order  where  service  carried  the  stigma  of  servitude, 
where  work  and  enjoyment  came  more  and  more 
to  be  thought  the  concern  of  different  castes. 
Creative  joy  dies  out  in  a  world  of  the  ready-made. 

Slavery  is  the  negative  reason  for  the  Greek 
degringolade  ;  but  it  is  of  the  positive  factors  that 
we  are  in  search.  What,  in  positive  terms,  was  the 


ii 


12  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


missing  principle  in  a  system  that  evolved  a  high 
aesthetico-moral  ideal,  a  glorious  art,  and  the  least 
unsatisfactory  political  method  known  to  history, 
and  yet  fell  into  decadence  ?  Freedom,  of  course, 
is  the  antithesis  of  slavery.  But  we  must  be  patient 
for  a  while.  Freedom  is  not  to  be  pinned  down  by 
a  word  or  a  phrase.  We  must  wait  for  Rousseau 
before  we  find  even  a  naive  and  unbalanced  expres¬ 
sion  of  social  liberty  as  an  educational  ideal,  though 
we  shall  see  the  reality  in  some  degree  accomplished 
in  medieval  times. 

Those  who  inherited  the  Greek  empire  of  ideas 
did  not  even  inherit  all  the  Greek  inspiration  of 
partial  freedom.  The  Romans,  inspired  by  the 
Hellenistic  ideal,  had  to  interpret  that  ideal  within 
the  compass  of  their  own  heroic  but  materialistic 
limitations.  Primarily  Rome  sought  another  aspect 
of  the  great  truth  ;  and  Rome  also  failed  in  the 
very  climax  of  success.  But  the  Roman  spirit  im¬ 
ported  a  new  ideal  into  the  history  of  civilization, 
an  ideal  that  has  survived  the  changes  of  fifteen 
hundred  years.  To-day  in  any  discussion  of  respec¬ 
tive  national  values  a  Frenchman  identifies  himself 
proudly  with  la  race  latine.  He  appeals  thereby  to 
no  racial  fact,  as  the  ethnologists  remind  us  with 
tired  persistence,  but  to  an  idea.  The  res  publica 
embodied  a  thought  that  has  had  a  common  meaning 
for  the  Gracchi,  for  Caesar  Augustus,  for  Charle¬ 
magne,  and  for  the  idealists  of  the  French  Revolu¬ 
tion.  Every  Gothic  and  Frankish  combination  in 


ROMAN  AND  MEDIEVAL  IDEALS  13 

the  middle  history  of  Europe  that  aspired  to  unify 
the  European  peoples  sought  the  sanction  of  the 
old  title  and  called  itself  a  Roman  empire.  This 
was  not  only  for  the  associations  of  power  and 
dominion  that  the  name  carried.  Rome  was  not 
only  a  name  of  power  ;  the  title  symbolized  a  claim 
to  reliance  and  loyalty  that  rests  upon  more  than 
force.  There  was  a  kind  of  vast  homeliness  about 
the  Roman  ideal.  The  Romans  themselves  were 
not  only  conquerors  first,  protectors  afterwards, 
and  finally,  in  their  decadence,  parasites  upon  the 
peoples  whom  they  had  conquered.  There  was  some¬ 
thing  other  than  the  sense  of  Rome’s  protection  that 
niade  a  Briton  of  the  second  century  proud  to  be 
enrolled  a  Roman  citizen.  Rome  was  possessed  of 
a  certain  unifying  spirit ;  and  it  is  a  spirit  that  has 
haunted  Western  Europe  from  the  time  of  the 
Gothic  irruption  upon  Rome’s  decadence  until  the 
present  day.  Can  we  identify  any  aspect  of  this 
spirit  with  a  corresponding  aspect  of  Roman 
education  ? 

The  essence  of  Roman  teaching  was  Rome.  In 
the  days  of  Rome’s  ascendant  greatness  citizenship 
was  taught  as  perhaps  it  has  never  been  taught 
before  or  since.  And  the  person  to  whom  we  have 
first  to  look  for  an  explanation  is  the  Roman  mother. 
It  was  deliberately  made  an  essential  part  of  the 
Roman  system  that  for  seven  years  a  child  should 
be  in  his  mother’s  keeping.  The  State  stood  aside, 
and  trusted  to  maternal  care  ;  and  we  know  that 


14  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

that  which  is  trusted,  grows.  Roman  motherhood, 
growing  in  influence  and  responsibility,  grew  into 
alliance  with  the  Roman  ideal  as  a  whole.  Those 
first  seven  years  of  the  Roman  child’s  life  were  all 
important.  Roma  Dea  herself  directed  the  first 
determining  perceptions  and  ideals  of  her  sons  and 
daughters,  in  the  person  of  the  Roman  matron  ; 
and  this  was  possible  by  reason  of  a  splendid  identi¬ 
fication  between  motherhood  and  the  motherland. 
Roman  motherhood,  invested  with  all  the  dignity 
of  Rome,  vindicated  its  high  status  naturally  and 
inevitably  ;  and  the  soul  of  his  country  for  the 
Roman  was  made  visible  in  the  sight  or  memory  of 
the  eyes  into  which  he  had  looked  most  deeply  as 
a  child.  This  was  feminine  enfranchisement  indeed. 
Can  we  hope  for  the  reattainment  of  such  an  ideal,  as 
modern  womanhood  rises  to  a  new  dignity  of  service  ? 
Past  vagaries  of  agitation  apart,  a  new  order  is  or¬ 
ganically  accomplishing  itself ;  and  it  may  be  that 
our  millions  of  domestic  glories  and  tragedies  to-day 
are  destined  to  have  a  collective  outcome  in  the 
deeper  recognition  of  what  motherhood  means  to 
the  State.  Further,  there  is  promise  in  the  growing 
tendency  of  the  modern  educated  mother  towards 
an  eager  realization  of  opportunities  rather  than 
an  alarmed  desire  to  delegate  responsibilities. 

It  does  not  follow  that  if  we  come  to  effect  a 
revaluation  of  the  Roman  motherhood-ideal  in  our 
own  times  we  shall  have  to  make  the  same  demand 
upon  the  time  and  energy  of  mothers  as  the  Romans 


ROMAN  AND  MEDIEVAL  IDEALS  15 

made.  Our  conditions  are  widely  different  from 
theirs,  to  say  the  least ;  and  it  is  the  essence  of  the 
enfranchisement  that  is  actually  taking  place, 
apart  from  its  political  symbol  and  instrument,  that 
women  are  finding  wider  spheres  of  interest  and 
influence  in  every  activity  that  affects  the  condi¬ 
tions  of  to-day.  On  the  other  side  of  the  picture 
we  have  the  kindergarten  and  the  Montessori 
school  developing  methods  of  teaching  the  young 
child  which  at  their  best  are  essentially  motherly, 
and  very  much  more  educative  than  the  methods 
that  any  but  a  tiny  minority  of  mothers  could 
apply.  Does  this  mean  a  delegation  of  the  mother’s 
responsibilities  ?  It  should  mean  only  their  better 
expression  through  a  higher  social  organization. 
All  civilized  advance  depends  upon  increasing 
division  of  labour,  upon  increasing  specialism 
coupled  with  increasing  co-operation ;  and  the 
expert  teacher  of  young  children  is  a  specialist  who 
co-operates  with  the  mother  to  effect  a  higher  ex¬ 
pression  of  maternal  responsibility  than  the  mother 
could  contrive  by  herself.  But  our  danger  lies 
always  in  producing  our  specialists  and  then  for¬ 
getting  about  the  co-operation  ;  we  achieve  dif¬ 
ferences  of  function  without  the  unity  in  diversity 
that  gives  them  value,  if  we  neglect  the  link  of  a 
union  in  understanding  and  aim  between  the 
specialist  and  those  for  whom  the  specialist  works. 

An  imitation  Romanism  that  would  close  the 
kindergartens  and  infant  schools  and  send  the 


16  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


children  back  to  their  nurseries — or  to  distracted 
kitchen  living-rooms — is  not  a  revaluation  of  the 
Roman  idea.  We  can  see  the  true  revaluation  being 
brought  about  in  the  increase  of  maternal  interest 
in  and  understanding  of  the  work  of  schools,  giving 
hope  that  co-operation  between  home  and  school 
may  become  a  vital  interchange,  and  the  school  a 
true  reflection  of  the  desires  of  an  understanding 
motherhood.  A  Roman  mother,  reincarnate  in 
these  times,  can  hardly  be  imagined  as  resting 
satisfied  with  getting  her  “  jewels  ”  conveniently 
out  of  the  way,  or  remaining  detached  from  the 
activities  of  their  daily  absence.  And  the  modern 
State,  realizing  that  it  cannot  usurp  the  function 
of  mother-training  without  the  inspiration  of  mother 
wit,  may  perhaps  learn  to  enlist  the  co-operation  of 
mothers  along  the  lines  that  private  philanthropy 
has  already  begun  to  mark  out.  But  much  thought¬ 
ful  care  is  needed  to  translate  the  spontaneous 
simplicity  of  the  Roman  system  into  terms  of  the 
complex  realities  of  to-day. 

We  leave  aside  a  great  body  of  interesting  detail 
with  regard  to  Roman  education  in  thus  abstracting 
the  ideal  of  State  motherhood  for  a' central  generali¬ 
zation  ;  and  we  must  recognize  that  this,  like  all 
generalizations,  is  in  part  a  figure  of  speech.  But, 
in  making  it,  we  are  endeavouring,  to  symbolize,  if 
no  more,  a  great  underlying  reality  of  Roman  life. 
And  it  is  interesting  to  watch  the  progress  and  the 
continuity  in  change  of  this  motherhood-ideal.  The 


ROMAN  AND  MEDIEVAL  IDEALS  17 

Christian  era  came  upon  a  Rome  already  sickening 
from  the  luxury  and  artificiality  that  resulted  from 
her  parasitism  upon  the  provinces.  Roma  Dea  had 
become  gross  and  lazy,  a  cushioned  deity.  What 
more  natural  than  that  a  mother  Church  should 
begin  to  take  her  place — that  a  Church  in  process 
of  formation  and  organization  should  seek  to  satisfy 
the  demand  for  a  motherhood-ideal  ?  Gradually 
but  completely  the  Church  took  over  the  function 
of  universalized  motherhood,  and  did  much,  we  may 
think,  if  not  all,  to  conserve  it  in  safe  harbourage 
through  the  welter  and  chaos  that  succeeded .  the 
Gothic  irruption. 

As  comparative  order  grew  out  of  chaos  there 
began  what  may  be  summarized  as  the  Romantic 
Era,  with  chivalry  as  its  fundamental  note.  The 
motherhood-ideal  had  found  its  shrine  and  its 
position  of  mild,  austere  dignity  in  Church  worship, 
and  the  preux  chevalier  found  his  secular  inspiration 
in  the  Lady  of  the  Lists.  It  may  be  something  more 
than  a  fancy  that  this  universal  spirit  of  knightly 
romance  had  its  correspondence  with  the  principal 
fact  of  the  times  :  civilization  was  now  not  a  mother 
to  be  revered,  but  a  mistress  to  be  won.  It  is  typical 
of  the  synthetic  genius  of  Charlemagne,  the  author 
of  the  finest  of  all  the  attempts  at  a  new  “  Roman 
Empire  ”  and  of  the  attempt  that  had  the  most 
lasting  influence,  that  he  should  have  seen  educa¬ 
tional  opportunity  in  the  stirrings  and  strivings  of 
the  knightly  impulse,  and  laboured  to  unify  the 
c 


i8  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


teaching  of  chivalry  with  the  religious  and  scholarly 
training  of  the  monastic  schools.  Not  only  did  he 
develop  the  famous  “  palace  school  ”  that  accom¬ 
panied  the  Royal  Court  from  place  to  place  into 
a  genuinely  educational  institution,  with  the  help 
of  the  eighth-century  English  educator,  Alcuin  of 
York  ;  his  capitularies  of  the  years  787  and  789, 
containing  instructions  to  the  heads  of  schools, 
bear  witness  to  the  zealous  care  with  which  he  and 
Alcuin  supervised  and  broadened  the  activities  of 
the  monastic  schools  themselves.  Our  own  Board 
of  Education  circulars  breathe  no  deeper  spirit  of 
solicitude. 

Knighthood  alone,  and  romantic  knighthood  at 
that,  for  all  its  splendour  of  spirit,  might  well  have 
led  the  social  order  of  the  Middle  Ages  into  a  blind 
alley,  but  that  its  very  character,  generously  un- 
repressive  in  the  main,  permitted  the  growth  of 
another  and  a  complementary  ideal.  It  was  not  a 
knightly  and  a  priestly  order  in  sole  alliance  that 
produced  Gothic  architecture,  that  amazing  proof 
of  a  sustained  and  an  ever-developing  corporate 
vitality.  The  successive  miracles  of  the  Gothic 
bear  witness  to  the  long  continuance  of  a  fine  ideal 
of  craftsmanship  and  to  the  high  regard  in  which  the 
individual  craftsman  was  held.  Greek  architecture 
could  be  noble  and  free  in  design  but  slavish  in  exe¬ 
cution  ;  nothing  but  the  labour  and  the  love  of  free 
men  could  have  built  the  cathedral  of  Chartres  or 
Lincoln.  Besides  the  primary  pervading  influence  of 


ROMAN  AND  MEDIEVAL  IDEALS  19 

the  Christian  spirit  of  common  worship  and  service 
there  was  an  education  that  upheld  and  developed 
the  ideal  of  craftsmanship.  It  was  almost  entirely 
an  education  of  apprenticeship  in  studio  and  work¬ 
shop,  though  it  is  likely  that  the  burghers’  schools, 
the  educational  institutions  of  the  well-to-do  mer¬ 
chant  class,  contributed  in  the  awakening  of  young 
minds  to  thought  and  appreciation  that  bore  fruit 
later  in  noble  design  or  in  generous  and  discrim¬ 
inating  support  for  the  work  of  others. 

We  shall  touch  later  upon  the  causes,  often  enough 
expounded  by  now,  of  the  decline  of  craftsmanship, 
and  upon  the  broad  lines  along  which  it  may 
perhaps  be  revived  as  a  living  and  a  civilizing  force. 
William  Morris  and  his  school  have  done  much — 
very  much  more  than  is  generally  realized — not  to 
revive  the  old  ideal  in  its  old  form  (always  a  hopeless 
task  for  reformers,  whose  business  indeed  is  the 
re-forming  of  the  old),  but  to  make  the  revaluation 
of  the  old  ideal  the  inspiration  of  the  new.  The 
work  done  in  some  of  our  county  schools,  reflecting 
the  inspiration  of  Morris  in  every  harmony  of 
thought  with  substance,  bears  witness  to  a  true 
revival  that  is  struggling  to  make  itself  felt.  But 
meanwhile  many  idealist  workers  in  the  same  field 
have  treated  the  subject  of  craftsmanship  as  though 
nothing  were  possible  but  a  sheer,  uncompromising 
return  to  the  medieval  ideal  as  it  was,  which  would 
involve  an  impossible  return — fortunately  impos¬ 
sible  in  most  respects — to  medieval  conditions.  Can 


20  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

it  be  hoped  that  our  sporadic  and  tentative  little 
colonies  of  medievalist  handworkers  will  reassemble 
after  the  war  to  be  the  seed  of  a  new  luxuriance  of 
free  craftsmanship  ?  Probably  the  most  they  can 
do  is  to  keep  a  spark  of  the  old  ideal  alive — a  far 
from  negligible  function.  A  much  greater  hope  lies 
in  broadening  the  basis  of  education  till  every  worker 
grow's  up  a  craftsman  in  thought  and  feeling— and 
until  the  term  “  worker  ”  becomes  a  title  of  honour, 
bestowed  upon  craftsmanship  of  mind  and  hand 
alike,  not  the  supercilious  label  of  a  class  distinction. 
This  is  part  of  a  very  necessary  revolution  in  our 
educational  system — a  revolution  that  the  gigantic 
shock  of  war  may  help  to  bring  about,  and  a  revolu¬ 
tion  that  would  give  us  a  new  and  a  more  stable 
social  order  by  a  process  of  natural  and  organic 
development — an  order  quite  different,  in  all  likeli¬ 
hood,  from  any  that  has  been  propounded,  ready¬ 
made,  by  the  wisest  of  political  theorists. 

We  can  use  so  slippery  a  phrase  as  “  broadening 
the  basis  ”  of  education  only  in  earnest  of  an  attempt 
to  define  what  it  should  imply,  not  only  in  relation 
to  labour  and  craftsmanship,  but  to  the  whole  field 
of  educational  problems.  Pursuing  our  roughly 
historical  method  we  find  that  from  the  Middle 
Ages  onwards  educational  ideals  become  crystal¬ 
lized  in  the  teaching  of  individual  educators  ;  and 
it  is  in  tracing  the  main  tendencies  to  which  certain 
of  these  great  representatives  have  given  expression 
that  we  shall  hope,  now,  to  elicit  some  general 


ROMAN  AND  MEDIEVAL  IDEALS  21 


synthesis  of  educational  beliefs.  The  passions  that 
inspired  the  great  achievements  of  civilization  in 
the  past  are,  in  a  sense,  irrecoverable  ;  in  an  exact 
and  literal  sense  nothing  can  be  again  what  it  has 
been.  But  there  is  no  bygone  ideal  that  cannot  find 
its  reincarnation  in  the  thought  of  some  new  pioneer  ; 
and  the  great  educators  of  our  own  era  have  re¬ 
vitalized,  as  we  shall  see,  much  of  the  inspiration 
that  has  been  the  glory  of  the  past,  besides  fore¬ 
shadowing  the  ideals  on  which  our  hope  for  the 
future  depends. 

This  chapter  has  omitted,  or  passed  over  with  a 
couple  of  bare,  tentative  references,  the  introduc¬ 
tion  into  education,  as  into  the  story  of  civilized  life 
as  a  whole,  of  a  greater  uplifting  and  civilizing  force 
than  any  upon  which  this  book  will  directly  touch. 
The  opening  of  the  Christian  epoch  raises  questions 
that  go  far  wider  and  deeper  than  the  Roman  ideal 
of  State  motherhood  or  the  medieval  ideals  of 
chivalry  and  of  craftsmanship.  But  the  direct 
teaching  of  Christianity  has  become  a  controversial 
subject,  so  intricately  controversial  that  a  book  of 
this  character  could  not  attempt  to  disengage  the 
issues  that  are  involved  in  it.  If  this  is  a  confession 
of  weakness,  it  is  only  one  voice  in  a  general  con¬ 
fession.  Among  the  things  left  undone  that  we 
ought  to  have  done  has  been  the  bringing  out  of  the 
unity  that  underlies  the  diversities  of  religious 
thought ;  and  the  result  is  intellectual  chaos  in 
spiritual  matters.  We  shall  trace  the  gradual 


22  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


struggle  of  educational  thought  towards  the  edu¬ 
cational  unities  ;  and  it  may  be  that  with  man’s 
still  further  realization  of  these  a  spirit  will  be  bred 
that  will  dispute  less  about  Christ’s  teachings  and 
carry  them  out  more. 


Ill 


THE  RENAISSANCE 

IT  is  difficult  to  imagine  the  glow  of  enthusiasm 
amid  which  the  foundations  were  laid  of  our 
tradition  of  classical  culture,  when  the  spirit  of 
Hellas  was  a  glorious  rediscovery  and  teachers  of 
Greek  were  sought  out  eagerly  and  with  difficulty 
by  those  who  had  caught  a  spark  of  the  new  fire 
that  was  abroad.  It  is  all  too  easy,  on  the  other 
hand,  to  forget  the  magnitude  of  our  debt  to  the 
early  humanist  educators,  remembering  only  the 
formalism  and  sterility  into  which  the  classical  side 
of  their  ideal,  divorced  from  their  abundant  vitality 
of  interest  in  natural  science,  speedily  lapsed  in  the 
hands  of  their  later  misinterpreted.  It  was  pre¬ 
cisely  such  formalism  against  which  they  warred, 
and  so  often  warred  in  vain.  The  lifeless  scholiast 
reappears  in  every  generation  ;  and  Petrarch’s 
scathing  account  of  the  teaching  of  his  times  is 
applicable,  mutatis  mutandis,  to  much  of  our  classical 
work  to-day.  But  the  right  reaction  from  a  dead 
classicism  must  always  be  in  the  direction  of  a  live 
classicism,  not  of  a  revolt  against  the  misused 
classics  themselves.  The  inheritance  of  the  true 


23 


24  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

classic  spirit  always  has  been,  and  perhaps  always 
will  be,  the  privilege,  or  the  choice,  of  the  few  ;  but 
those  few  are  the  guardians  of  a  fountain  of  living 
water  upon  whose  continued  flow  an  essential  part 
of  the  vitality  of  literature  and  philosophy  depends. 

Neither  is  their  guardianship  without  the  value 
that  is  called  practical,  though  we  may  recall  the 
fact  only  when  such  an  incident  occurs  as  the  calling 
of  an  eminent  scholar  and  literary  critic  to  the 
rescue  of  military  education,  because  subalterns, 
products  of  our  public  school  training  in  classic 
literature,  were  found  incapable  of  writing  a  lucid 
dispatch.  This  particular  occurrence  of  only  a 
few  years  ago  points  with  a  neatness  all  its  own  to 
the  double  moral  that  formal  classicism  stifles,  and 
that  what  formal  classicism  has  stifled  only  living 
classicism  can  revive.  But  the  influence  of  live 
scholarship,  which  means  something  other  than  a 
scholarship  that  so  neglects  the  mother  tongue  as 
to  teach  the  translating  of  ^Bschylus  to  English 
boys  who  have  never  been  taught  to  translate 
Chaucer,  touches  the  practical  side  of  life  at  a  thou¬ 
sand  points.  To  neglect  classics  for  the  practicali¬ 
ties  of  science  is  exactly  as  foolish  as  to  neglect 
science  for  classics.  How  much  of  the  prevailing 
ignorance  of  the  teachings  of  science,  in  such 
matters  as  child-welfare  for  example,  is  due  on  the 
one  hand  to  lack  of  the  sound  literary  training  that 
makes  for  intelligent  reading,  and  on  the  other  to 
the  expression  of  the  root  conclusions  of  science  in 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


25 

language  bristling  with  unnecessary  technicalities 
and  devoid  of  scholarly  lucidity  ? 

Something  very  like  our  modern  trouble  in  deter¬ 
mining  the  place  of  science  was  to  follow  the  partial 
decline  of  humanist  education,  when  the  “  realists  ” 
began  to  assert  the  advantages  of  scientific  training. 
But  it  must  not  be  forgotten  that  the  best  early 
exponents  of  the  classic  ideal  were  also  those  who 
best  paved  the  way  for  the  coming  realist  movement. 
Vittorius  was  “  the  first  modern  schoolmaster  ”  ; 
Melanchthon,  a  classical  enthusiast,  advocated  the 
addition  of  physics,  mathematics,  and  astronomy 
to  school  curricula ;  Erasmus,  a  humanist  par 
excellence,  wished  to  introduce  geography,  arith¬ 
metic,  and  natural  science.  The  realist  educators 
are  often  regarded  as  having  saved  the  educational 
situation  when  the  humanists  had  landed  the  schools 
in  hopeless  formalism  ;  it  would  be  more  true  to 
say  that  they  carried  on  and  developed  the  work  of 
the  best  humanists,  though  it  is  true  enough  that 
they  carried  it  out  of  the  reach  of  many  unworthy 
heirs  of  the  humanist  ideal.  Then,  as  now,  there 
was  a  classic  spirit  that  was  ready  and  eager  to 
reach  out  and  come  into  touch  with  the  modern, 
conscious  of  its  own  vitality  and  of  all  that  it  had 
to  give  as  well  as  to  gain  by  contact  with  the  newer 
developments  of  thought.  Then,  as  at  all  times  and 
in  all  human  activities,  there  was  a  self-sufficient 
band  of  formalists  receding  from  educational  evolu¬ 
tion  along  their  appointed  blind  alley  ;  but,  essen- 


26  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


tially,  the  task  of  the  great  reformers,  “  humanist  ” 
and  <f  realist  ”  alike,  was  not  transition,  but  syn¬ 
thesis.  The  shade  of  Vittorius  would  have  hailed 
the  later  and  completer  educational  system  of 
Comenius  with  rejoicing,  though,  if  we  imagine  the 
shade  of  John  Sturm,  he  who  cut  down  the  breaks 
between  school  periods  in  order  to  diminish  the  risk 
of  his  boys  talking  together  in  their  mother-tongue 
instead  of  in  Latin,  looking  over  the  shoulder  of 
Comenius  as  the  latter  wrote  his  Pansophia,  we  can 
only  conceive  his  expression  as  one  of  bewilderment 
mingled  with  the  gravest  suspicion. 

The  Latinity,  even  the  Ciceronianism,  of  Vit¬ 
torius  was  essentially  spontaneous  and  alive  ;  his 
Hellenism  was  intellectual  vitality  itself,  and  led 
naturally  into  a  wide  field  of  scientific  and  philo¬ 
sophical  inquiry.  It  is  the  teacher  whose  mental  life 
is  a  joy  to  him  who  can  educate  by  inspiring  positive 
enthusiasms  and  need  have  little  or  no  recourse  to 
negative  restrictions  and  taboos.  These,  and  the 
harsh  discipline  necessary  to  enforce  them,  were  the 
work  of  later  misinterpreters  of  the  early  humanist 
message,  who  drew  down  the  gigantesque  ridicule 
of  Rabelais  and  the  polished  criticism  of  Montaigne. 
“  We  toil,”  wrote  the  latter,  “  only  to  stuff  the 
memory,  and  leave  the  conscience  and  understand¬ 
ing  void.”  The  short-sighted  attempt  to  impose  a 
scholastic  taboo  upon  the  study  and  even  the  use  of 
the  vernacular  must  have  been  largely  responsible 
for  lifeless  work  and  ferocious  punishments.  The 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


2  7 

gentle  Ascham  pointed  the  way,  as  did  Montaigne, 
to  a  revival  of  the  true  humanist  spirit  ;  while 
Richard  Mulcaster,  severe  but  inspiring,  boldly 
preached  training  in  the  mother  tongue.  “  It  would 
have  been  a  vast  gain  to  all  Europe,”  as  Mr.  R.  B. 
Quick  has  observed,  “  if  Mulcaster  had  been  fol¬ 
lowed  instead  of  Sturm.” 

It  was  largely  against  the  inhumanity  of  the 
pseudo  “humanists,”  an  inhumanity  that  was  in¬ 
tellectual  as  well  as  personal,  that  the  realist  school 
reacted.  The  Spaniard  Vives  was  perhaps  the  first 
tentative  pioneer  of  realist  method,  and  it  is  note¬ 
worthy  that  he  is  also  remembered  for  two  achieve¬ 
ments  which  give  evidence  of  a  wide  sense  of  human 
values :  a  treatise  embodying  one  of  the  first 
systematic  schemes  for  the  care  of  the  poor,  and 
another  on  the  Instruction  of  a  Christian  Woman, 
which  strongly  recalls  the  Roman  motherhood- 
ideal,  while  anticipating  much  that  has  since  been 
accomplished  in  the  fulfilment  of  women’s  claim  to 
education.  Indeed,  it  is  as  a  humanist  in  the 
modern  and  extended  sense  rather  than  as  a  realist 
in  the  technical  sense  that  Vives  stands  out.  He 
was  instinctively  attracted  to  natural  science  as  a 
means  of  educational  development,  but  he  was 
timorous  of  adventuring  far  in  this  direction,  and 
did  little  more  than  advocate  a  “  silent  contempla¬ 
tion  of  nature.”  Even  this,  he  felt  bound  to  remark, 
“  may  prove  dangerous  to  those  not  deeply  grounded 
in  faith,”  an  observation  that  throws  a  sudden  light 


28  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


upon  the  concealed  conflict  between  faith  and  fact 
which  was  then  finding  expression  in  the  heart¬ 
burnings  of  the  Reformation.  We  may  say  that  of 
realist  method  Vives  gave  no  more  than  a  preliminary 
hint,  the  record  of  an  aspiration  almost  unfulfilled. 
But  he  did  much  to  clear  the  ground  of  lumber. 
His  attacks  on  the  scholastic  dignity  that  will  not 
humble  itself  to  seek  out  truth  for  its  own  sake,  and 
his  deprecation  of  the  personal  ambition  of  teachers, 
so  often  associated  with  pretentiousness,  are  not 
without  their  warning  for  the  specialist  educators 
of  our  own  day  ;  and  his  partial  unravelling  of  the 
dense  tangle  into  which  educational  method  had 
grown  simplified  the  task  of  his  greater  successor 
Comenius,  as  the  latter  himself  testified,  though  he 
added  that  Vives  “  understood  better  where  the 
fault  lay  than  what  might  be  the  remedy.”  Further, 
it  is  probable  that  Vives,  through  his  association 
with  Erasmus  and  More,  had  a  not  inconsiderable 
influence  upon  English  educational  thought,  par¬ 
ticularly  upon  that  of  the  English  philosopher  who 
most  definitely  furthered  the  realist  cause. 

The  great  educational  service  of  Francis  Bacon 
was  to  formulate  and  systematize  a  realization  of 
Nature  and  natural  law  that  before  his  time  had  been 
largely  instinctive  and  inarticulate.  The  ideal  of 
the  artist-craftsman,  continually  renewing  its  in¬ 
spiration  through  close  and  keen  observation  of 
Nature,  had  developed  a  certain  intuitive  under¬ 
standing  of  the  ways  of  Nature,  but  it  remained  to 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


29 

bring  that  understanding  to  the  conscious  surface. 
Bacon  felt  intensely  the  need  to  enrich  the  intellec¬ 
tual  life,  “  cobwebs  of  learning,  admirable  for  the 
fineness  of  thread  and  work,  but  of  no  substance 
or  profit,”  by  the  direct  study  of  natural  causation. 
“  We  stamp  the  seal  of  our  own  image  upon  the  crea¬ 
tures  and  works  of  God,  instead  of  carefully  searching 
for  and  acknowledging  the  seal  of  the  Creator  manifest 
in  them.”  The  words  are  still  true  of  too  much  of 
our  secondary  education  to-day,  and  not  only  in 
the  continued  survival  of  that  odd  anachronism, 
the  exclusive  “  classical  side.”  Science  teaching 
itself  is  barely  beginning  to  emerge  from  its  pre¬ 
occupation  with  three  or  four  narrowly-conceived 
specialist  “  sciences  ”  into  a  cognizance  of  the 
fundamentals  upon  which  so  much  of  modern  pro¬ 
gressive  thought  is  based.  We  have  to  look  to  the 
elementary  schools  for  any  general  realization  of 
first  principles,  for  the  beginnings  of  a  real  study 
of  “  that  speech  and  language  whose  lines  have 
gone  out  into  all  the  earth,  and  no  confusion  of 
tongues  has  ever  befallen  it.” 

In  the  sixteenth  century,  as  in  the  nineteenth, 
resistance  to  the  demand  for  broader  curricula  was 
largely  due  to  the  mechanical  difficulty  of  finding 
time  for  new  studies.  In  both  cases  the  obstacle 
consisted,  more  than  the  objectors  realized,  in  the 
involution  and  partial  atrophy  of  method  in  teach¬ 
ing  which  had  become  sacrosanct  through  custom. 
Our  own  time  has  had  the  advantage,  for  those  who 


30  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

would  avail  themselves  of  it,  of  an  enlightened 
methodology  developed  during  three  hundred  years 
of  progressive  experience.  But  one  of  the  main 
facts  of  that  experience  is  still  largely  unlearnt. 
We  continually  hear  talk  of  the  danger  of  “  over¬ 
crowding  the  curriculum  ”  whenever  a  claim  is  put 
forward  for  some  neglected  branch  of  knowledge  or 
activity.  It  sounds  as  though  a  curriculum,  the 
ordering  of  the  subjects  that  a  school  undertakes 
to  teach,  were  a  work  of  art  and  its  own  justification, 
like  the  picture  to  which  the  painter’s  friends 
implore  him  not  to  add  another  touch  for  fear  of 
spoiling  it.  The  business  of  the  curriculum  is  to 
combine  the  things  that  are  necessary  to  be  learned  ; 
and  the  history  of  education  shows,  as  indeed  we 
might  have  expected,  that  the  number  and  diversity 
of  these  things  are  continually  increasing  with  the 
number  and  diversity  of  man’s  activities  and 
interests.  It  is  of  no  use  to  bewail  a  fact  that  is  not 
only  a  consequence  but  a  cause  of  man’s  advance, 
or  to  complain  of  a  difficulty,  inherent  in  the  nature 
of  things,  which  education  has  always  had  to  face. 
To  say  that  our  curricula  will  not  hold  what  is 
necessary  is  to  confess  that  we  are  allowing  them 
to  become  rigid  and  inextensible,  although  the  power 
continually  to  extend  their  capacity  is  a  power 
without  which  education  would  gradually  and 
steadily  cease  to  be  education,  and  become  a  some¬ 
what  uninteresting  branch  of  archaeology.  Happily, 
this  extreme  is  never  reached.  The  backward  type 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


31 

of  education  either  dies  a  belated  and  an  unlamented 
death,  or  the  new  and  necessary  knowledge  adopts 
the  attitude  of  Alice  towards  the  Mad  Tea-Party. 
“  No  room  !  No  room  !  ”  is  the  cry  of  the  March 
Hare  and  the  Mad  Hatter  upon  Alice’s  arrival. 
“  There’s  plenty  of  room  !  ”  says  Alice,  and  quietly 
takes  her  seat  at  the  table.  The  subsequent  verbal 
quibbles  in  which  the  Mad  Hatter  indulges  are  not 
without  their  resemblance  to  a  certain  scholastic 
verbalism  that  goes  far  to  explain  the  cry  of  “  No 
time  !  ”  so  often  raised  by  the  scholiast. 

In  a  sense,  the  history  of  education  is  simply  the 
history  of  the  curriculum’s  expansion,  and  the 
greatest  educators  have  been  those  who  contrived 
to  expand  it  to  the  best  purpose.  A  prospective 
glance  at  the  two  principal  factors  of  expansion 
may  facilitate  our  further  study  of  the  process, 
since  it  was  not  yet  a  consciously  realized  process, 
and  its  development  easily  escapes  the  attention 
among  the  many  other  considerations  that  will 
demand  our  notice.  Without  these  two  factors 
the  extension  of  the  curriculum  would  mean  either 
the  accumulation  of  “  subjects  ”  and  the  mounting 
up  of  the  hours  needed  for  their  study  until  the 
limitations  of  human  endurance  put  a  merciful  end 
to  the  process,  or  the  treatment  of  these  manifold 
"  subjects  ”  so  thinly  and  briefly  that  nothing  would 
be  taught  but  smatterings — a  word  that  generally 
closures  any  modern  discussion  of  a  further  exten¬ 
sion  of  the  curriculum. 


32  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

The  first  need  that  we  find  supplied  by  the  great 
educators  is  the  need  for  simplification.  Hand  in 
hand  with  the  natural  process  by  which  necessary 
knowledge  becomes  continually  more  abundant  and 
diverse,  there  fortunately  goes  another  natural  pro¬ 
cess  by  which  the  mind  of  man  becomes  increasingly 
capable  of  boiling  down  the  manifold  of  detail  to  its 
essentials.  This  faculty  is  to  be  observed,  often  in 
impressive  measure,  in  all  the  great  educators. 
They  simplify  knowledge  by  centralizing  it. 

The  second  need  springs  immediately  to  the  mind 
in  corrective  criticism  of  the  first.  The  detail  must 
not  be  lost.  The  boiling-down  process  must  not 
leave  education  with  no  mental  food  to  give  but  a 
kind  of  concentrated  extract  of  knowledge,  pre¬ 
digested  in  the  mind  of  the  teacher.  Here  we  seem 
to  find  the  former  dilemma  only  a  single  stage 
further  advanced.  How  is  all  the  necessary  detail 
to  be  worked  in  ?  We  shall  return  to  this  question 
later  on,  with  the  example  before  us  of  actual 
methods  by  which  its  solution  has  been  approached  ; 
but  it  may  enlighten  our  search  to  anticipate  in 
some  degree  the  conclusion  that  emerges.  Our  aim 
is  to  make  two  ideas  grow  where  only  one  grew 
before.  But  suppose  we  seem  to  be  already  over¬ 
crowding  the  minds  of  the  young  with  diverse 
ideas  ?  We  cannot  make  two  blades  of  corn  grow 
where  only  one  grew  before  if  every  square  yard  of 
ground  already  holds  as  many  roots  as  it  can  feed — 
provided  that  weeds  have  been  exterminated  ;  and 


THE  RENAISSANCE  33 

there  is  a  limit  to  the  use  of  concentrated  fertilisers. 
Kut  two  eais  of  coin  cannot  be  grown  from  the  same 
root ;  two  ideas  can,  and  many  more  than  two. 
The  principle  of  which  we  find  ourselves  in  search 
is  one  that  shall  make  it  possible  to  develop  common 
roots  in  the  mind  for  many  and  diverse  aspects  of 
knowledge  ,  and  the  method  for  the  carrying  out 
of  that  principle  must  be  one  that  frees  time  and 
mental  energy  by  making  one  effort  of  comprehen¬ 
sion  on  the  learner’s  part  do  the  work  of  two.  It  is 
by  a  method  of  this  kind,  if  we  come  to  think  of  it, 
that  the  mind  of  man  itself  has  evolved. 

The  humanist  and  realist  methods,  at  one  in  their 
original  inspiration,  fell  at  the  end  of  the  sixteenth 
century  into  a  disputatious  diversity  of  case- 
hardened  scholastic  systems.  With  the  seventeenth 
century  educational  methods  began  to  be  simplified 
and  lationally  co-ordinated,  and  it  thus  became 
possible  for  the  schools  greatly  to  extend  their  range 
of  thought.  We  have  next  to  investigate  the  ideals 
and  the  influence  of  the  founder  of  the  modern 
synthetic  curriculum,  Comenius,  who  looked  upon 
the  educational  world  of  his  day  and  cried,  "  Oh, 
that  God  would  have  pity  on  us,  and  recollect  us 
from  this  dispersion  !  ” 


D 


IV 


COMENIUS  AND  THE  “PAN- 
SOPHICAL  WAY” 

GREAT  hall,  nobly  proportioned,  hung  with 


pictures  ;  behind  us,  the  imposing  entrance¬ 
way  by  which  we  have  just  been  admitted  ;  before 
and  on  either  side  of  us,  seven  doorways,  each  with 
its  inscription,  its  call  to  the  intellectual  and  spiritual 
ambition  of  the  learner  :  “  Let  no  one  enter  who  is 
ignorant  of  natural  philosophy  ”  ;  "  Let  no  one 
enter  who  cannot  reason  ”  ;  “  Let  no  one  enter 
who  is  irreligious.”  Thus  the  last  three  legends  of 
the  series  ;  above  the  portal  of  the  first  class-room, 
that  into  which  children  of  seven  and  eight  are 
trooping,  the  inscription  is  “  Let  no  one  enter  who 
cannot  read,”  for  Comenius  is  an  enthusiast  for  the 
“  mother’s  seven  years  ”  of  the  Roman  system,  and 
has  written  an  inspiring  book  for  the  guidance  of 
the  mother  who  would  fit  her  child  for  entrance  into 
the  great  pansophical  school. 

It  is  not  easy  to  give  a  concise  account  of  the 
ideals  pursued  and  the  methods  employed  in  this 
magnificent  temple  of  learning,  because  the  temple 
was  never  built  in  its  entirety,  and  to  this  day  much 


34 


"  THE  PANSOPHICAL  WAY  ” 


35 

of  the  architect’s  conception  of  the  completed  edifice 
remains  unrealized.  Also,  the  plans  that  Comenius 
left  enshrined  in  the  monumental  folio  whose  publi¬ 
cation  the  world  owes  to  the  discriminating  gener¬ 
osity  of  his  Dutch  patrons,  the  de  Geers,  suggest 
many  variants  of  the  essential  Comenian  system. 
As  a  writer,  Comenius,  like  other  great  educational 
theorists,  was  rhetorical  and  diffuse,  easily  carried 
away  by  his  own  symbolism  ;  his  consistent  desire, 
we  may  be  sure,  was  to  get  concrete  material  under 
his  hand  and  to  mould  and  fashion  an  actual  school 
according  to  the  promptings  of  his  own  inspiration 
when  confronted  with  the  daily  and  yearly  problems 
set  by  real  conditions.  This  he  could  do  but  seldom, 
and  never  for  long  enough  to  give  effect  to  his  whole 
synthetic  purpose.  But  perhaps  it  is  not  all  a  matter 
for  regret  that  the  military  alarms  and  excursions 
of  his  time  so  harried  him  from  place  to  place.  A 
single  finished  achievement,  a  perfected  pansophic 
school  brought  to  full  realization  in  Moravia  or 
Transylvania,  might  have  proved  premature  in  an 
age  of  whose  educational  thought  Comenius  was  so 
many  centuries  in  advance.  The  genius  ahead  of 
his  time  often  functions  best  as  a  sower  of  seeds ; 
and  Comenius  as  a  wanderer  scattered  seeds  of 
educational  reform  broadcast,  of  which  many  sprung 
up,  and  many  more  were  carried  by  other  and  smaller 
birds  of  passage  into  every  country  in  Europe. 

Critical  appreciators  of  Comenius  are  prone  to 
temper  their  enthusiasm  by  the  use  of  a  word  that 


36  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

seriously  misinterprets  the  Moravian  master’s  ideal. 
For  the  word  "  pansophic,”  with  which  he  elected  to 
label  his  system,  they  are  always  substituting  the 
very  different  term  “encyclopaedic,”  with  the  im¬ 
plication  that  it  connotes  the  same  idea.  Nothing 
could  be  less  true  to  educational  fact.  Because 
every  student  of  Comenius’  writings  is  torn  between 
admiration  for  their  lofty  idealistic  value  and  a 
commonsense  reluctance  to  be  swept  off  his  feet  by 
their  emotional  rhetoric — to  say  nothing  of  certain 
promptings  of  the  comic  spirit  that  their  naivete 
now  and  again  invites — we  are  by  no  means  called 
upon  to  minimize  their  central  inspiration,  still  less 
to  falsify  it.  Encyclopaedic  teaching  is  neither  prac¬ 
ticable  nor  desirable  ;  "  pansophic  ”  teaching  is 

both.  The  one  aims  at  making  the  learner  an  in¬ 
exhaustible  mine  of  information  upon  every  sub¬ 
ject,  the  other  would  make  him  capable  of  wisdom 
in  his  regard  for  any  subject,  and  able  to  see  any 
subject  in  relation  to  others  and  to  general  prin¬ 
ciples.  “  Encyclopaedism,  not  of  acquired  know¬ 
ledge,  but  of  faculty  and  interest — that  is  what  we 
aim  at,”  writes  Professor  Laurie  ;  but  this  is  twist¬ 
ing  the  word  out  of  its  accepted  meaning.  "  Univer- 
salism  ”  would  perhaps  be  a  fitter  term,  and  would 
at  any  rate  evade  association  with  the  views  of  the 
French  encyclopedistes. 

A  demand  for  universalized  knowledge,  even  if 
we  have  cleared  away  the  notion  that  it  means  a 
desire  to  pack  the  whole  universe  into  the  brain  of 


“  THE  PANSOPHICAL  WAY 


every  child,  must  be  recognized  to  be  a  demand  of 
immense  magnitude.  The  Comenian  precept  brushes 
aside  the  war  of  subjects  ”  with  the  sweeping 
simplicity  of  a  single  formula  :  Teach  everything. 
Some  instinct  of  the  mind  rises  at  once  in  response  ; 
after  all,  we  say  to  ourselves,  this  is  exactly  what 
education  is  for,  once  it  is  granted  that  education 
is  not  a  process  akin  to  the  packing  of  a  portmanteau 
for  a  journey,  but  rather  to  the  equipment  of  a 
workshop  with  tools.  The  mind  is  not  so  much  a 
receptacle  as  an  instrument,  and  an  instrument  that 
has  to  be  adaptable  to  a  countless  and  an  increasing 
variety  of  uses.  Conscious  of  the  ever-impending 
call  for  fresh  adaptations  of  the  mind  and  fuller 
powers  of  grasp,  if  new  developments  of  knowledge 
are  not  to  fall  into  an  increasing  sterility  of  speciali¬ 
zation,  we  may  well  decide  that  education  must 
hurry  to  widen  our  touch  with  to-day’s  knowledge, 
before  the  knowledge  of  to-morrow  is  upon  us. 

But  there  is  a  countervailing  instinct  that  rises 
in  dignified  and,  within  limits,  very  reasonable  pro¬ 
test  against  allowing  ourselves  to  be  bustled  in  this 
fashion  by  the  evolution  of  our  own  minds.  This, 
at  its  best,  is  a  form  of  the  instinct  which  reminds  us 
to  make  sure  of  our  unities  before  admitting  fresh 
diversity  ;  and  in  this  respect  it  has  from  Comenius 
the  strongest  support  that  could  be  desired,  as  is 
shown  by  his  careful  arrangement  of  the  successive 
stages  through  which  his  pupils  were  to  pass— a 
type  of  arrangement  which,  as  carefully  and 


38  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

logically  applied  in  our  public  school  curricula,  would 
more  than  double  their  effectiveness  and  capacity. 
But  the  instinct  of  resistance  to  the  demands  of 
universalism  has  in  it  also  something  of  the  academic 
spirit  that  says  “  leave  me,  leave  me  to  repose,”  and, 
left  to  repose,  sinks  into  a  graceful  euthanasia.  To 
keep  an  educational  atmosphere  unchanged  is  to 
become  progressively  if  painlessly  stifled  by  it. 
This  is  a  very  different  matter  from  the  sound  con¬ 
servatism  that  fears  lest  man  may  drop  his  tested 
values  to  run  a  nightmare  race  with  his  own  evolu¬ 
tion. 

Fears,  however,  although  we  can  see  their  use  in 
promoting  necessary  caution,  do  not  give  even  to 
conservatism  its  highest  inspiration.  Conservatism 
can  be  too  fearful  and  too  cautious  to  conserve  ; 
and  educational  conservatism  has  failed  to  con¬ 
serve  the  tradition  of  Comenius  through  fear  of 
universalism.  But  universalism  is  essentially  a 
conservative  principle  ;  it  is  the  elements  of  know¬ 
ledge  and  of  wisdom  that  are  detached  and  circum¬ 
scribed  in  the  mind  which  get  lost  the  most  easily, 
and  the  only  safe  mooring-lines  for  a  truth  are  its 
relations  with  a  universe  of  truths.  Why  is  it,  then, 
that  the  fear  of  universalism  arises  ? 

Education  upon  “  pansophic  ”  lines,  even  if  it 
were  to  embrace  only  the  knowledge  of  Comenius’s 
day,  makes  a  colossal  demand  upon  the  mental 
equipment  of  the  teacher,  both  in  knowledge  of 
fact  and  in  ability  to  trace  the  relations  between 


“THE  PANSOPHICAL  WAY  ”  39 

facts  and  to  co-ordinate  them  into  a  whole.  If  the 
child  is  not  to  be  made  encyclopaedic,  it  seems  as 
though  the  teacher  must  be  ;  and  there  is  required 
of  him  a  power  “  to  see  life  steadily,  and  see  it 
whole  ”  in  all  its  countless  activities,  which  very 
few  teachers,  and  those  few  mistakenly,  believe 
themselves  to  possess.  There  is  nothing  wrong 
with  an  unattainable  standard  ;  on  the  contrary 
there  is  only  a  very  limited  use  for  standards  that 
are  attainable.  The  ideal  of  complete  all-round 
knowledge  cannot  be  realized,  but  it  is  worth 
striving  for,  and  its  rewards  are  not  at  the  un¬ 
attainable  end  but  at  every  stage  of  the  struggle. 
And  we  are  all  aware  that  teachers  as  a  rule  know 
far  too  little  outside  the  range  of  their  chosen 
“  subjects  ” — so  little  that  their  “  subjects,”  how¬ 
ever  painstakingly  studied  and  taught,  suffer  con¬ 
tinually  from  lack  of  reference  to  anything  outside 
themselves.  The  fear  is  not  that  the  ideal  may  be 
pursued  but  that  it  may  be  pursued  in  the  wrong 
way. 

Encyclopaedism  is  precisely  the  wrong  way,  for 
the  teacher  as  much  as  for  the  taught,  if  we  use  the 
word  in  its  accepted  sense.  It  is  an  abstraction  of 
the  substance  from  the  spirit  of  knowledge  ;  an 
abstraction  made  by  the  conscientious  student  who, 
anxious  for  milestones  that  may  reassure  him  of  his 
progress,  makes  the  acquisition  of  a  given  body  of 
tangible  fact  his  criterion  of  advance.  This  is  to 
snatch  at  the  substance  and  miss  the  all-important 


40  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

shadow  that  tells  in  what  direction  the  light  is  fall¬ 
ing  ;  and  it  is  our  direction  in  regard  to  the  light  of 
reality  that  matters.  The  achievement  of  Comenius 
was  to  express  in  his  system  a  more  real  criterion  of 
advance  than  this.  Its  nature  can  perhaps  be  better 
illustrated  than  described.  The  public  school  boy 
says  :  “  We  did  chemistry  last  term,  and  next  term 
we  are  going  to  do  physics.  We  don’t  do  Greek.” 
The  “  pansophic  ”  pupil’s  explanation  to  the  home 
circle  can  better  be  imagined  in  some  such  form  as 
this  :  “  Comenius  says  that  we  cannot  be  philo¬ 
sophers  till  we  have  begun  to  think  like  scientists,  and 
that  then  we  shall  learn  Greek  which  is  the  key  to 
philosophy.”  The  Comenian  pupil  lived,  of  course# 
in  an  age  when  it  was  quite  good  form  for  a  boy  to 
admit  that  he  took  an  interest  in  thought.  The 
spirit  of  the  Renaissance  had  not  yet  become  a 
thing  to  be  shamefacedly  concealed. 

Comenius  not  only  reawakened  this  spirit,  but 
gave  it  consciousness  ;  and  in  the  phrase  <f  con¬ 
sciousness  of  knowledge  ”  we  may  perhaps  find  a 
partial  expression  of  the  aim  that  lifted  his  system 
above  the  intellectual  error  of  encyclopaedism.  He 
taught  children  to  feel  joy  in  the  mental  power  that 
they  were  gradually  learning  to  wield  ;  and  this 
joy  in  understanding  leads  naturally  to  a  reaching- 
out  for  further  knowledge,  essentially  different  from 
the  mere  collector’s  spirit  which  loves  to  accumulate 
facts.  A  child  does  not  only  need  to  know ;  he 
wantsHo  be  the  knower,  to  feel  the  power  of  com- 


“  THE  PANSOPHICAL  WAY  ”  41 

prehension  gathering  in  himself  and  extending  its 
reach.  All  children  are  born  universalists.  From 
the  day  of  their  birth  we  can  watch  the  first, 
elementary  workings  of  their  instinctive  desire  to 
understand  the  universe.  The  desire,  rightly  fed, 
grows  continuously  through  life,  always  extending  its 
vision  and  its  grasp.  Fostered  during  immaturity 
by  the  educational  process,  it  does  not  end  there, 
but  goes  on  in  the  never-ending  process  of  self- 
education  through  experience  of  life. 

A  study  of  the  magnificent  ideal  that  inspires  the 
writings  of  Comenius  is  apt  to  leave  the  reader 
girding  at  the  generations  that  followed,  and  our 
own  in  particular,  for  the  obtuseness  and  the  lack 
of  vision  that  prevented  them  from  realizing  the 
ideal  in  its  fulness.  Much  of  the  volume  of  accusa¬ 
tion  that  arises  in  the  mind  is  well  founded  ;  but  it 
has  to  be  remembered  that  the  universalism  of 
Comenius  was  a  giant’s  step  upwards  from  the  usual 
practice  of  education.  We  are  not  required,  in  the 
interests  of  the  new  generation,  to  sacrifice  ourselves 
and  become  exemplars  of  the  encyclopaedic  mind  ; 
very  much  the  contrary.  But  we  are  faced  with  a 
still  more  difficult  demand.  To  teach  universalism 
we  have  to  be  universalists  ourselves,  and  this  means 
that  we  are  required  to  leap,  ourselves,  to  a  position 
which  we  expect  to  make  attainable  for  our  suc¬ 
cessors  only  through  a  universalist  training  from 
childhood.  In  these  terms,  the  demand  becomes 
impossible.  But  we  can  see  the  possibility  of  a 


42  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

gradual  attempt  to  grasp  and  increasingly  to  ex¬ 
press  in  our  teaching  the  essence  of  the  universalist 
outlook  ;  and  we  shall  see  that  the  methods  of  sub¬ 
sequent  educators  make  the  task  distinctly  less 
formidable.  A  formidable  task,  like  an  ideal  that 
cannot  wholly  be  attained,  attracts  rather  than 
repels  when  steps  towards  gradual  achievement 
become  visible,  and  we  shall  come  upon  a  very  useful 
step-ladder  later  on.  Meanwhile  the  first  essential 
step  is  so  to  study  Comenius  as  to  see  what  he 
desired,  and  the  second  is  to  consider  whether  any 
of  his  methods  can  be  revalued  in  terms  of  our  own. 

It  is  easy  to  render  lip-service  to  the  pansophic 
ideal ;  it  is  more  difficult  to  enter  into  its  spirit. 
We  have  dwelt  first  upon  the  most  intangible 
quality  in  the  works  of  Comenius  because  concen¬ 
tration  upon  his  methodology  alone,  as  upon  that  of 
any  great  educator,  permits  the  evaporation  of  that 
fine  essence  which  is  the  soul  of  the  system.  And 
when  we  inquire  what  was  the  point  of  method  first 
in  importance  for  the  fulfilment  of  his  ideal,  we  shall 
do  well  to  keep  the  essential  Comenian  atmosphere 
in  mind,  and  to  ask  by  what  means  it  was  created 
and  sustained.  A  sense  of  orderly  progression  from 
plateau  to  higher  plateau  of  knowledge  was  to  per¬ 
vade  the  school ;  not  only  the  fact,  but  the  delighted 
consciousness  of  it.  It  is  seldom  that  we  shall  be 
able  to  elicit  a  direct  and  immediately  practicable 
hint  for  any  and  every  teacher  from  our  present 
study  of  main  principles  ;  the  great  requirements 


“  THE  PANSOPHICAL  WAY  ” 


43 


can  as  a  rule  be  realized  only  through  co-operation 
and  the  growth  of  a  common  impulse  ;  but  here  is 
a  point  upon  which  every  individual  can  not  only 
hold  an  opinion,  but  give  it  effect.  For  the  task  of 
social  regeneration  and  reconstruction  that  lies 
before  us  there  is  need,  before  any  other  quality  of 
the  mind,  of  enlightened  foresight.  Do  we,  to  any 
appreciable  extent,  direct  our  educational  methods 
towards  the  attainment  of  this  quality  ?  Are  we 
not  far  too  much  inclined,  in  actual  teaching,  to 
stick  to  the  present,  to  keep  the  child’s  vision  bounded 
by  the  small,  precise  achievement  of  the  moment  ? 
This  is  surely  as  uneducative  as  would  be  the 
opposite  fault  of  neglecting  the  necessary  step-by- 
step  plodding  for  the  sake  of  a  purely  visionary  out¬ 
look.  Children  are  often  pulled  up  and  told  to  attend 
to  the  business  in  hand  when  their  seeming  digres¬ 
sion  from  the  subject  is  the  first  immature  sign  of  a 
desire  to  get  its  bearings  in  the  cosmos,  and  to  look 
forward  along  the  vista  that  it  is  beginning  to 
open  up  for  them.  Unwillingness  to  welcome  this 
tendency,  and  to  direct  and  foster  it  by  every  means 
that  can  be  thought  out,  means  failure  to  develop 
from  its  early  stages  that  very  faculty  of  wise  fore¬ 
sight  whose  possession  we  so  desire  for  the  coming 
generation. 

Another  point  of  Comenian  method  gives  food 
for  speculation  over  a  wider  field  than  that  of  the 
teacher’s  individual  task.  Among  the  formulae  of  the 
Pansophic  School  stress  is  continually  laid  on  the 


44  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

precept  “  teach  one  thing  at  a  time.”  This  applica¬ 
tion  to  didactics  of  what  proverbially  “  is  a  very 
good  rule  ”  might  perhaps  be  better  represented  in 
modern  method.  Even  a  tentative  experiment  in 
actual  school  work  shows  very  quickly  that  inten¬ 
sive  culture  of  successive  subjects  is  a  natural  and  a 
repaying  process,  if— the  largest  of  ifs— it  is  com¬ 
bined  with  extensive  treatment  of  the  widest  sort. 
It  was  his  recognition  of  the  latter  necessity  that 
led  Comenius  to  envisage  the  idea  of  correlation  a 
couple  of  centuries  before  Herbart.  We  may  think 
that  Comenius  rode  too  hard  his  hobby  of  regarding 
subjects  as  successive  goals  for  the  child’s  ambition, 
and  it  is  noteworthy  that  it  takes  a  more  modest 
place  when  he  is  describing  those  parts  of  the 
pansophic  system  that  he  had  been  able  to  work  out 
in  full  practice  ;  but  there  is  much  to  be  said  for 
it  none  the  less,  in  the  hands  of  teachers  who  realize 
that  the  study  of  one  thing  is  only  the  study  of  one 
aspect  of  everything.  It  would,  of  course,  remain 
for  careful  consideration  which  subjects  are  the  best 
suited  for  such  treatment,  and  which  flourish  best 
under  continuous  study,  “little  and  often.”  The 
allocation  to  appropriate  subjects,  for  a  few  weeks 
each,  let  us  say,  of  comfortably  long  periods,  with 
much  heuristic  and  objective  work  and  no  rushing 
or  scamping,  would  have  three  distinct  advantages. 
It  is  preparation  for  a  type  of  work,  often  to  be  met 
with  in  later  life,  at  which  the  routine-trained  are 
apt  to  fail ;  it  gives  a  welcome  change  at  one  period 


"  THE  PANSOPHICAL  WAY  ” 


45 

of  the  day  from  continual  mental  transitions,  out 
of  one  subject  and  into  another,  which  carried  on  all 
day  long  are  somewhat  nerve-fretting  when  the 
best  has  been  said  in  favour  of  change  of  occupation  ; 
and  it  helps  further  in  training  the  child’s  sense  of 
time-perspective. 

These  are  but  two  reflections  among  a  multitude 
that  may  suggest  themselves  to  the  student  of 
Comenius.  Of  his  guiding  ideals  we  may  say  that 
one  was  the  reconciliation  of  the  rising  conflict  of  his 
time — it  is  not  yet  fully  composed — between  teach¬ 
ing  through  words  and  teaching  through  things ;  and 
that  another  was  the  development  through  education 
of  an  inclusive  outlook  not  only,  as  it  were,  in  space, 
but  in  time,  so  as  to  train  up  minds  and  spirits  that 
would  be  sensitive  and  responsive  to  the  present, 
but  would  not  live  in  the  present  alone.  We  shall 
be  able  to  trace  a  partial,  but  only  a  partial  influence 
upon  educational  thought,  contemporary  and  sub¬ 
sequent,  of  this  reformer,  whose  “  unfailing  aspira¬ 
tions,”  as  Raumer  said,  ‘'lifted  up  in  a  large  part 
of  Europe  many  good  men  prostrated  by  the  terrors 
of  the  times,  and  inspired  them  with  the  hope  that 
by  pious  and  wise  systems  of  education  there  might 
be  reared  up  a  race  of  men  more  pleasing  to  God.” 
The  Europe  of  our  own  day  is  not  without  its  need 
of  such  an  influence. 


V 


MILTON  AND  CASTE  EDUCATION 


LTHOUGH  the  root  ideals  of  Comenius’s 


1  system  never  penetrated  very  deeply  into  the 
educational  thought  of  Europe,  seeds  of  his  wide 
scattering  at  least  sprang  up  and  grew,  if  into 
systems  that  appear  meagre  and  stunted  compared 
with  his  original  conception.  His  effect  upon  his 
age,  as  is  often  the  case  with  the  prophets  of  great 
truths,  was  rather  the  effect  of  his  personality  than 
of  his  gospel.  One  great  reason  for  the  extent  of  his 
influence  was  his  intellectual  humility,  and  his  readi¬ 
ness  not  only  to  respond  to  the  ideals  of  others,  his 
contemporaries  or  immediate  predecessors  in  educa¬ 
tional  reform,  such  as  Andrea,  Alstead,  and  Ratke, 
but  to  express  a  generous  over-estimate  of  his  debt 
to  them.  This  attitude  of  mind  has  an  attraction 
all  its  own.  Comenius  was  essentially  a  learner- 
critic  of  the  education  of  his  times,  and  the  platitude 
that  any  teacher  must  be  continuously  a  learner  if 
his  teaching  is  to  have  vitality  and  appeal  extends 
itself  equally  to  the  work  of  the  propagandist.  The 
educational  reformer  who  sets  a  ring  fence  round  his 
system  has  made  the  first  provision  for  its  decay. 


MILTON  AND  CASTE  EDUCATION  47 


The  European  reputation  of  Comenius  was  largely 
the  personal  reputation  of  a  master  filled  with  a 
childlike  eagerness  to  give  of  his  riches.  Probably 
English  education  owes  more  than  can  easily  be 
realized  to  the  seeds  that  he  dropped  upon  a  soil 
hastily  and  none  too  deeply  tilled  during  a  brief  lull 
in  the  strife  of  King  and  Parliament — a  time  of 
many  interwoven  strains  and  stresses,  little  suited 
to  the  calm  working  out  of  educational  schemes. 
It  may  be  interesting  to  trace  his  probable  influence 
upon  one  great  English  mind  of  this  time,  that  of 
Milton,  as  the  giant  of  Puritan  poetry  appears  during 
his  brief  and  not  wholly  dignified  excursion  into  the 
educational  field.  This  special  case  is  the  more 
useful  as  an  illustration  because  Milton  appears  to 
have  been,  or  to  have  become,  not  only  immune  but 
somewhat  hostile  to  the  effect  of  Comenius’s  per¬ 
sonality,  and  to  have  been  influenced  almost  against 
his  will  by  Comenius’s  ideas.  A  first  glance  at  the 
facts  would  suggest  the  unedifying  spectacle  of  a 
great  man  yielding  to  envy  of  another’s  great¬ 
ness,  though  in  another  field.  Milton  undoubtedly 
was  in  close  touch,  for  a  time,  with  the  ideals  of  the 
great  educator,  and  it  is  hard  to  avoid  the  conclusion 
that  he  borrowed  as  much  of  the  Comenian  system 
as  appealed  to  his  fancy  or  to  his  comprehension  of 
educational  needs,  and  then  put  the  source  of  his 
inspiration  out  of  his  mind.  But  we  shall  see  a  likeli¬ 
hood  that  his  excuse  was  something  better  than 
mere  jealousy,  or  than  a  simple  wish  to  play  the 


48  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

leading  part  himself  upon  the  English  educational 
stage. 

In  1641  Comenius  came  to  England,  a  Parlia- 
mentaiy  invitation  having  apparently  been  extended 
to  him  at  the  instance  of  Hartlib,  a  Polish  friend  of 
Milton's,  and  an  educational  enthusiast.  Within 
a  year  Parliament  had  a  scheme  in  hand  for  “  a 
college  with  revenues/'  we  may  presume  on  the 
Comenian  model ;  but  the  times  were  too  troublous 
for  its  fulfilment,  and  shortly  afterwards  the  threat 
of  lenewed  civil  war  drove  Comenius  to  less  con¬ 
genial  work  in  Sweden,  where  his  methodology  was 
esteemed,  but  his  pansophic  ideal  viewed  askance. 
It  may  be  that  if  he  had  remained  in  England  the 
dedication  of  Milton’s  Tractate  of  Education  would 
have  borne  his  name  instead  of  Hartlib’s,  for  we 
may  imagine  that  as  a  runaway  he  fell  somewhat 
m  Milton’s  austere  estimation  ;  though  it  is  hard  to 
blame  him,  after  losing  his  all  in  earlier  years — not 
only  his  material  all,  but  those  near  and  dear  to 
him  in  the  sack  of  bulnek  by  the  Spaniards,  for  a 
certain  lack  of  enthusiasm  about  other  people’s  wars. 
But  Milton  was  never  the  man  to  forgive  any 
appaient  slight  to  his  politico-religious  principles  ; 
and  the  supposition  that  he  was  offended,  though 
based  upon  mere  conjecture,  perhaps  best  explains 
(and  most  charitably)  his  patent  desire  to  withhold 
credit  from  Comenius.  "To  search  what  many 
modern  Janua  s  ’  and  f  Didactics,’  more  than  ever 
I  shall  lead,  have  projected,  my  inclination  leads 


MILTON  AND  CASTE  EDUCATION  49 

me  not.”  Whatever  the  motive  of  this  rather  un¬ 
generous  declaration,  it  draws  down  the  inevitable 
comment  that  the  Tractate  might  have  been  a  very 
much  sounder  and  better-knit  essay  if  Milton  had 
given  a  modicum  of  attention  to  the  works  of 
Comenius  which  he  thus  decries,  especially  to 
1  he  Great  Didactic.  The  T ractate  represents  what 
immediately  survived  of  the  Comenian  tradition 
whether  Milton  liked  it  or  not,  and  whether  or  not 
he  was  conscious  of  its  influence  upon  his  own  work. 
It  draws  us  into  a  very  narrow  circle  after  the 
breadth  and  far-sightedness  of  Comenius  ;  from  the 
strictly  educational  point  of  view  Milton  is  by  far 
the  lesser  man,  and  he  claims  the  appropriate 
privilege  of  taking  his  stand  as  the  practical  person. 
“  Brief  I  shall  endeavour  to  be  ;  for  that  which  I 
have  to  say,  assuredly  this  nation  hath  extreme 
need  should  be  done  rather  than  spoken.” 

Certainly  “  this  nation  ”  was  in  a  parlous  state 
educationally,  if  we  are  to  judge  by  the  vigour  with 
which  Milton  lays  about  him.  “  Grammatical  flats 
and  shallows”;  “  ragged  notions  and  babble¬ 
ments  ” ;  and  then,  with  the  true  leonine  tail-lash, 
"  we  hale  and  drag  our  choicest  and  hopefullest  wits 
to  that  asinine  feast  of  sow-thistles  and  brambles 
which  is  commonly  set  before  them  as  all  the  food 
and  entertainment  of  their  tenderest  and  most 
docible  age.”  But  it  is  only  for  these  “  choicest 
and  hopefullest  wits  ”  that  he  proposes  to  cater,  as 
drawn  from  “  our  noble  and  gentle  youth  ”  ;  a  long 
£ 


50  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

drop  from  the  Comenian  level,  where  no  exclusion 
of  class  or  sex  was  thought  of.  Milton’s  system 
aims  at  the  education  of  a  governing  class  ;  his 
entire  view  of  education  is  based  upon  the  oligarchic 
ideal,  as  indeed  our  own  prevalent  views  still  are. 
He  is  among  those  who  have  thought  that  one 
dominent  class  would,  as  a  whole,  be  both  willing 
and  able  to  arrange  for  the  best  the  affairs  of  a  whole 
people.  He  would  educate  the  few  \  Comenius 
would  educate  everyone,  on  the  same  principle  by 
which  he  would  "teach  everything.”  Milton  is 
exclusive,  Comenius  inclusive.  "  In  this  respect,” 
says  Masson,  "the  passions  and  the  projects  of 
Comenius  were  a  world  wider  than  Milton’s.” 
Further,  Milton  has  only  partially  digested  the 
universalism  of  Comenius  ;  at  twenty-three  or  so  his 
pupils  are  to  be  sent  travelling,  "  not  to  learn 
principles  but  to  enlarge  experience  ” — as  though 
the  two  factors  could  be  separated  !  Similarly,  it 
is  only  when  pupils  have  become  "  fraught  with 
an  universal  insight  into  things”  (a  sufficiently 
Comenian  touch)  that  they  are  to  be  trained  as  "  able 
writers  and  composers  in  every  excellent  matter  ”  ; 
all  through,  artificial  antitheses  between  principle, 
experience,  and  expression  prevail. 

It  is  easy  to  pick  holes  in  the  Tractate  ;  but  it  is 
more  profitable  to  trace  the  elements  of  realized 
synthetic  method  which  it  contains,  and  to  observe 
that  the  seeds  which  Comenius  sowed  in  England 
did  not  all  shrivel  upon  the  difficult  soil  of  the  time. 


MILTON  AND  CASTE  EDUCATION  51 

We  find  that  a  high  place  is  given  to  sense  training 
— the  teacher  is  reproached  for  not  “  beginning  with 
those  Arts  most  easy  (and  those  be  such  as  are  most 
obvious  to  the  sense)/ ’  Some  attention  is  given 
to  methods  that  allow  the  emergence  of  individual 
types  :  “  These  ways  would  try  all  their  peculiar 
gifts  of  nature  ;  and,  if  there  were  any  secret  excel¬ 
lence  among  them,  would  fetch  it  out,  and  give  it 
fair  opportunities  to  advance  itself  by.”  One 
phrase  after  another  suggests  synthesis  of  know¬ 
ledge  :  “  Any  compendious  method  of  Natural 

Philosophy  ”  ;  “  Geography,  with  a  general  compact 
of  Physics/’  and  so  forth.  Ethics,  formally  con¬ 
sidered,  comes  only  after  a  thorough  study  of 
natural  causation.  As  the  next  stage,  “  Being  per¬ 
fect  in  the  knowledge  of  personal  duty,  they  may 
then  begin  the  study  of  (Economics/’  It  will  be 
noticed  that  we  are  here  following  the  course  of  a 
Comenian  sequence  of  subjects,  somewhat  imper¬ 
fectly  ordered.  Last  of  all,  with  the  study  of  "  Law 
and  legal  justice  ”  (a  sound  distinction  !)  comes 
Politics — "  to  know  the  beginning,  end,  and  reason 
of  political  societies ;  that  they  ”  (the  Miltonic 
pupils)  “  may  not  in  a  dangerous  fit  of  the  common¬ 
wealth  be  such  poor,  shaken,  uncertain  reeds,  of  such 
a  tottering  conscience  as  many  of  our  great  counsel¬ 
lors  have  lately  shewn  themselves.”  Here  we  see 
Milton  displaying  a  characteristic  of  all  believers  in 
an  oligarchic  system — the  tendency  that  naturally 
follows  to  criticise  their  oligarchs  for  failing  to  em- 


52  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

body  the  will  of  the  community  instead  of  their  own 
feebler  individual  will.  The  inevitable  condemna¬ 
tion  which  all  oligarchs  incur,  even  from  their  own 
side,  is  that  they  have  failed  to  be  democratic. 

In  his  treatment  of  law  and  politics  Milton’s 
avowed  debt  to  the  Greeks  is  manifest ;  when  it 
comes  to  his  profession  that  he  is  indebted  to  the 
Greeks  alone  we  may  be  pardoned  for  a  little  scep¬ 
ticism.  We  might  guess  that  Hartlib  still  tried  to 
uphold  the  Comenian  view  before  him,  and  that  he 
took  refuge  in  claiming  that  he  could  get  it  all  out 
of  Plato  and  Aristotle.  Even  in  so  far  as  he  could, 
it  was  largely  Comenius  who  had  kindled  him  to  the 
enterprise.  We  have  dwelt  at  some  length  upon  the 
position  of  Milton  as  a  partial  pioneer  in  educational 
thought,  not  for  its  intrinsic  importance — the 
Tractate  is  a  far  from  representative  by-product 
of  his  genius — but  because  by  realizing  the  step 
downward,  in  the  region  of  educational  ideals,  from 
Comenius  even  to  such  a  mind  as  Milton’s,  we  obtain 
some  measure  of  the  gulf  above  which  Comenius 
towered,  a  gulf  that  is  not  yet  filled.  Milton  in  his 
turn  was  to  be  set  among  the  educational  prophets  ; 
and  Richard  Wynne,  long  afterwards,  in  dedicating 
to  George  III  his  anthology  of  "  Essays  on  Educa¬ 
tion  by  Milton,  Locke,  and  the  Editors  of  the 
Spectator,  &c.,”  hopes  that  "  the  noble  efforts  of 
those  great  geniuses  mentioned  above  .  .  .  may  bring 
about  a  more  general  reformation  in  our  method  of 
educating  the  British  youth.” 


MILTON  AND  CASTE  EDUCATION  53 

Our  method  of  educating  the  British  youth  has 
two  distinct  aspects,  so  artificially  distinct  that  they 
have  to  be  considered  separately  when  we  ask  our¬ 
selves  what  we  are  about  in  our  attempts  to  equip 
new  generations  with  the  means  for  surpassing  the 
old.  (The  anti-educational  view  that  “  what  was 
good  enough  for  me  is  good  enough  for  my  children  ” 
is  fortunately  growing  so  rare  that  it  can  be  left  out 
of  account.)  Our  State  is  a  mixture  of  oligarchy — 
in  its  turn  a  mixture  of  aristocracy,  plutocracy,  and 
bureaucracy — with  a  small  proportion  of  democracy. 
Our  education,  in  so  far  as  it  has  any  relation  to  our 
polity,  in  part  reflects  traditional  ideas  of  a  govern¬ 
ing  class  and  a  governed  mass,  and  in  part  repre¬ 
sents,  very  hazily,  the  supposition  that  we  are  a 
self-governing  people  in  a  sense  other  than  that  in 
which  all  peoples  are  ultimately  self-governing, 
since  fear  of  revolt  keeps  even  the  most  self-willed 
autocrat  in  some  degree  under  popular  control.  It 
is  only  comparatively  true  that  the  training  in  our 
public  schools  is  aristocratic  and  the  training  in  our 
State  schools  democratic.  The  modern  public 
school  has  many  of  the  characteristic  virtues  and 
faults  of  a  partial  democracy  ;  and  the  elementary 
school  is  at  least  potentially  open  to  be  made  the 
training-ground  of  an  almost  German  docility.  But 
it  is  true  in  the  absolute  sense  that  two  tendencies 
pervade  our  system  which  are  implacably  at  war 
with  one  another,  the  one  encouraging  class-separa¬ 
tion,  the  other  class-fusion.  The  conflict  is,  in 


54  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

education,  mainly  subterranean  ;  but  everyone  is 
aware  that  it  goes  on  continuously.  Nearly  every 
teacher  is  at  heart  a  propagandist  on  the  one  side 
or  the  other. 

It  is  convenient  to  raise  this  question  in  con¬ 
nection  with  the  contrast  between  Milton  and 
Comenius,  because  this  contrast  is  well  drummed 
into  every  student  of  educational  history,  and  the 
sequence  from  Milton  and  Locke  to  the  public 
school  is  well  recognized  as  a  fact  to  be  set  in  opposi¬ 
tion  to  the  sequence  from  Comenius  to  Froebel  and 
the  reformed  elementary  school ;  but  it  is  of  course 
a  problem  of  all  the  ages  that  we  are  considering. 
And  it  is  a  problem  for  which  there  appears  at  first 
sight  to  be  no  solution.  Reduced  to  its  elements  of 
the  two  desires,  native,  apparently,  and  ineradicable, 
in  two  types  of  the  human  mind — the  desire  to 
create  or  maintain  a  superior  class,  and  the  desire 
to  set  or  to  keep  the  classes  upon  an  equal  footing 
— the  conflict  is  simply  a  fact  of  human  natural 
history.  And  when  two  aims  are  seen  to  have  been 
both  vigorously  and  idealistically  pursued  through¬ 
out  the  vicissitudes  of  history,  the  strong  presump¬ 
tion  is  that  they  are  both  right  aims.  Is  political 
education,  then,  always  to  be  an  underground  civil 
war,  always  to  be  kept  underground  for  fear  its 
conscious  emergence  should  mean  open  war  ?  It 
can  scarcely  be  emphasized  too  strongly  that  how¬ 
ever  well  the  subject  of  civics  may  be  taught  in  the 
future — it  has  been  all  too  little  taught  in  the  past — 


MILTON  AND  CASTE  EDUCATION  55 

the  subject  of  modern  politics,  a  great  subject,  what¬ 
ever  may  be  thought  of  modern  politicians,  can 
never  be  honestly  and  broadmindedly  taught  at  all 
so  long  as  an  unavowed  warfare  is  in  progress 
between  a  principle  that  aims  at  the  differentiation  of 
classes  and  a  principle  that  aims  at  their  integration. 

But  if  this  reduction  of  the  two  warring  principles 
to  their  simplest  terms  is  sound — if  the  one  is  a 
desire  for  class-diversity,  and  the  other  a  desire  for 
class-unity — the  quarrel  disappears.  The  two  prin¬ 
ciples  coalesce  into  the  one  principle  of  unity  in 
diversity  which  we  know  to  be  at  the  root  of  all 
biological,  sociological  and  educational  advance. 
Conflict  between  the  ideal  of  unity  and  the  ideal  of 
diversity  is  simply  a  blind  breaking-up  of  the  part¬ 
nership  upon  which  the  progress  of  all  life  depends. 

The  difficulty  is  that  the  quarrel  cannot  be  re¬ 
garded  wholly  in  these  terms.  Superadded  to  the 
idea  of  class-differentiation  is  the  idea  that  the  most 
highly  differentiated  classes  have  an  intrinsic  right 
to  dominate  the  rest.  Qualifying  the  splendid  hope 
of  solidarity  among  classes  is  a  fear  which  identifies 
differentiation  with  dominance,  and  thus  is  led  to 
seek  a  dead  level  and  to  call  this  democracy.  But 
surely  we  can  assert  with  truth  that  both  the  idea 
of  class-dominance  and  the  idea  of  a  necessary 
levelling-down  in  the  scale  of  effective  being  are 
false  guides.  What  we  need  is  the  mutual  under¬ 
standing  between  classes  that  would  result  from  a 
realization  of  their  complete  dependence  UDon  one 


56  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

another,  and  would  lead  to  a  general  levelling-up  of 
opportunity  and  to  the  disappearance  of  status. 

Considered  in  terms  of  this  most  desirable  fellow¬ 
ship  between  the  members  of  our  body  politic,  the 
universalism  of  Comenius  is  far  above  the  conflict. 
Indeed,  its  only  fault  lies  in  being  too  far  above  it 
for  practical  peacemaking  ;  and  in  this  we  may  see 
perhaps  the  principal  reason  why  the  Comenian 
ideal  has  to  wait  so  unconscionable  a  time  for  realiza¬ 
tion.  Universalism  has  yet  to  be  completely  re¬ 
valued  so  that  the  inestimable  benefit  of  mutual 
understanding  that  it  has  to  offer  may  be  made 
obvious  in  its  practical  aspects,  though  we  shall  see 
that  something  has  been  done  by  successors  of 
Comenius  to  make  its  value  easier  to  realize.  The 
true  essence  of  universalism  escaped  Milton  almost 
entirely ;  but  there  would  be  justice  in  the  claim 
that  Milton  helped  to  keep  alive  a  qualified  univer¬ 
salism  in  a  corner  of  our  national  consciousness. 

Educational  ideals  are  shown  to  be  permanent  by 
two  tests ;  whether  they  survive  and  exercise  a  cumu¬ 
lative  influence  for  good,  and  whether  they  possess 
what  evolutionists  call  “  survival  value,”  reappear¬ 
ing,  like  suppressed  characters  in  a  species,  as  soon 
as  a  suitable  environment  is  regained.  Milton,  as 
educationist,  stands  midway  between  the  two 
criteria  ;  for  Wynne,  and  in  no  small  degree  for  the 
schools  of  to-day,  he  is  the  "  great  genius,”  the 
farther  column  of  an  arch  whose  nearer  column  we 
have  yet  to  perfect,  in  the  public  schools  ;  but  he 


MILTON  AND  CASTE  EDUCATION  57 

is  overspanned  by  the  greater  arch  of  the  Comenian 
tradition,  for  whose  nearer  column  a  secure  base  has 
begun  to  be  laid  in  our  elementary  schools.  Mean¬ 
while  it  is  to  the  best  product  of  the  Miltonic  type 
of  training,  the  more  broadminded  variety  of  univer¬ 
sity  scholar,  that  we  now  look  for  aid  when  we  plan 
for  the  further  realization  of  Comenian  ideals  ;  and 
it  is  out  of  broad  scholarship  of  this  type  that  there 
arose  the  ideal  of  education  for  the  pursuit  of  truth, 
which  we  have  next  to  consider  under  the  guidance 
of  John  Locke. 


VI 


LOCKE  AND  THE  QUEST 
OF  TRUTH 

DESIRE  to  impart  information  is,  perhaps, 


the  commonest  and  the  least  valuable  of  the 
motives  that  go  to  make  a  teacher.  A  desire  to 
communicate  true  and  sound  methods  of  thought 
is  not  so  common,  and  is  of  immensely  greater  value. 
The  inspiration  to  put  the  means  and  the  material 
of  thought  within  the  mental  reach  of  the  young, 
trusting  the  natural  bent  of  youth  towards  inquiry, 
imposing  the  right  minimum  of  direction,  and  even 
of  guidance,  and  so  developing  and  training  intel¬ 
lectual  initiative  as  well  as  mental  facility,  is  as 
inestimable  in  a  teacher  as  it  is  rare.  The  system 
of  education  outlined  by  John  Locke  swings  between 
the  two  latter  impulses.  By  tradition  an  upholder 
of  instruction  in  the  paths  of  truth,  he  was  by 
nature  a  devotee  of  that  truth  towards  which  no 
mind  can  win  unless  by  its  own  persistent  efforts. 
Certain  confusions  follow ;  Locke  the  instructor  is 
not  wholly  consistent  with  Locke  the  seeker,  and  the 
inconsistencies  are  sufficiently  obvious  ;  but,  dis¬ 
counting  these,  a  resultant  compromise  remains, 


LOCKE  AND  THE  QUEST  OF  TRUTH  59 


admirable  in  many  ways,  and  typical  of  much  that 
is  best  among  English  educational  ideals. 

It  may  have  been  a  negative  effect  of  his  tradition, 
a  fruit  of  the  reaction  from  Calvinism  and  predes¬ 
tination,  that  prevented  Locke  from  becoming  a 
whole-hearted  exponent  of  education  as  the  en¬ 
couragement  of  organic  growth.  As  Professor 
Adamson  has  observed,  his  notion  of  the  young 
mind  asa  “  tabula  rasa,  written  upon  by  experience 
only,”  affects  his  scheme  fundamentally.  We  can 
well  imagine  that  he  hankered  after  a  tabula  rasa 
when  the  alternative  was  a  tabula  inscripta  and  the 
writing  that  of  the  grim  followers  of  Calvin.  Cal¬ 
vinism  wrote  in  the  book  of  every  child’s  character 
that  he  was  already  foredoomed  ;  the  reaction  from 
Calvinism  rubbed  the  terrible  message  out  again, 
but  only  with  the  idea  of  leaving  the  page  blank  for 
the  instructor’s  use.  The  notion  of  characters  not 
to  be  set  down  in  teacher’s  copperplate,  but  to  be 
traced  with  slowly  increasing  certainty  and  clear¬ 
ness  by  childish  hands,  had  not  yet  come  into  its 
own.  To  change  the  metaphor  for  that  of  Comenius, 
the  garden  of  the  child’s  mind  was  wrongly  regarded 
as  virgin  soil,  to  be  sown  by  the  teacher  in  accordance 
with  a  formal  pattern.  The  teacher  of  to-day  has  less 
excuse  for  desiring,  or  assuming  that  he  has  been  given, 
a  blank  page  upon  which  he  may  write  what  seems 
good  to  him,  or  a  soil  that  he  may  sow  as  he  pleases. 
But  our  prevailing  practice  is  still  overarched  by 
Comenius,  with  his  conception  of  “  seeds  of  learn- 


6o  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


ing  ” — lying  unfertilized,  perhaps,  but  none  the  less 
distinctively  individual,  within  the  youthful  brain 
— which  education  has  “  to  bring  to  perfection  ” — 
to  their  own  perfection,  not  merely  to  conformity 
with  a  preconceived  pattern.  Locke  was  well 
enough  aware  that  truth  can  only  germinate  anew 
in  the  originative,  not  in  the  passively  recipient 
mind.  His  life  shows  his  trust  in  the  innate  germinal 
wisdom  ;  and  though  his  educational  scheme  is 
explicitly  laid  down  upon  formalist  lines,  his  for¬ 
malism  is  pleasingly  contradicted  at  every  turn  by 
his  reliance  upon  the  desire  of  the  young  to  create 
their  own  understanding.  Many  of  us,  especially 
in  the  public  schools,  might  do  well  to  take  on  from 
the  hands  of  Locke  that  modicum  of  the  Comenian 
ideal  which  he  inherited. 

Like  ourselves,  Locke  could  see  his  way  more 
clearly  towards  education  by  organic  development 
when  he  had  the  training  of  young  children  in  mind. 
And  to  this  ideal  he  added  a  thought  that  is  the 
natural  outcome  of  his  own  struggle  for  intellectual 
liberty.  Children,  he  says,  "  have  as  much  a  mind 
to  show  that  they  are  free  ;  that  their  good  actions 
come  from  themselves  ...  as  any  of  the  proudest  of 
you  grown  men.  .  .  .”  Further,  "  children  are  much 
less  apt  to  be  idle  than  men  ”  ;  but  “  this  is 
visible,  that  it  is  a  pain  to  children  to  keep 
their  thoughts  steady  to  anything.”  Here  his  desire 
to  inscribe  the  first  principles  of  truth  upon  the 
young  mind  meets  with  a  primary,  natural  check. 


LOCKE  AND  THE  QUEST  OF  TRUTH  61 

He  finds  his  way  round  the  obstacle  by  the  path  that 
was  rediscovered  later  by  the  educational  psycho¬ 
logists.  “  I  have  always  had  a  fancy  that  learning 
might  be  made  a  play  and  recreation  to  children  ; 
and  that  they  might  be  brought  to  desire  to  be 
taught,  if  it  were  proposed  to  them  as  a  thing  of 
honour,  credit,  delight,  and  recreation.  ...”  “I 
have  therefore  thought  that  if  playthings  were  fitted 
to  this  purpose,  as  they  are  usually  to  none.  .  . 
From  this  it  is  not  so  far  a  cry  to  the  methods  of 
Froebel.  Locke  adds  the  one  perennial  precept  of 
the  good  educator  :  “  Keep  the  mind  in  an  easy, 
calm  temper.  ...  It  is  as  impossible  to  draw  fair  and 
regular  characters  on  a  trembling  mind  as  on  a 
shaking  paper.” 

The  foregoing  quotations  point  clearly  enough  to 
a  confusion  that  even  Locke’s  orderly  mind  was  not 
able  in  his  generation  to  escape  ;  the  old  confusion 
that  makes  for  strife  between  education  and  in¬ 
struction,  in  the  strictly  derivative  sense  of  both 
terms.  It  comes  to  this,  that  he  wants  the  children’s 
minds  set  free  and  developed  along  the  lines  of  their 
natural  activities,  in  order  that  the  teacher  may  be 
able  to  write  upon  them  that  which  he  sees  fit  to 
write.  This,  as  a  thesis,  seems  contradictory  enough, 
but  the  contradiction  is  more  apparent  than  real. 
It  is  due  to  the  isolation  of  two  extremes — extremes 
that  centre  in  the  individual  and  the  social  concep¬ 
tions  of  life — omitting  all  the  correlative,  resolvent 
factors.  Freedom  and  natural  activity  are  very 


62  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

obviously  necessary  to  the  development  of  all  human 
values  ;  they  are  the  contribution  of  the  individual 
to  the  society.  The  teaching  of  tradition — of  the 
realized  truth  of  the  past,  with  its  corollary  of  con¬ 
trol  over  the  present — is  equally  necessary  ;  it  is 
the  contribution  of  the  society,  passed  on  by  the 
educational  system,  to  the  development  of  the 
individual.  Any  conflict  between  individual  liberty 
and  societal  tradition  must  needs  be  an  artificial 
conflict  at  bottom.  It  is,  indeed,  only  another  form 
of  that  conflict  between  the  principles  of  unity  and 
of  diversity  which  was  considered,  in  its  political 
aspect,  in  our  last  chapter.  The  ideal  of  individual 
liberty  is  a  diversity-ideal ;  the  ideal  of  a  tradition 
of  social  control  is  a  unity-ideal.  Education,  in  the 
strict  sense  of  drawing  out  ”  that  which  is  in  the 
individual  child,  is  a  process  that  favours  indi¬ 
vidualism.  Instruction,  in  the  strict  sense  of 
“  building  into  ”  the  child  that  which  the  society 
sees  as  truth,  is  a  process  of  social  guidance,  though 
it  is  true  that  the  best  instruction  is  self-instruction, 
and  that  the  surest  guidance  is  found  through 
methods  which  make  the  child  himself  the  redis¬ 
coverer  of  social  values.  To  advocate  either  process 
in  opposition  to  the  other  is  the  extreme  of  educa¬ 
tional  folly. 

Locke’s  essential  wisdom,  the  wisd®m  of  a  great 
philosopher  and  seeker  for  truth,  is  manifest  in  that 
he  braves  even  contradictions  in  his  instinctive 
insistence  upon  both  processes.  An  unsolved  con- 


LOCKE  AND  THE  QUEST  OF  TRUTH  63 

tradiction  is  the  bete  noire  of  the  professed  reasoner, 
and  Locke’s  mind  was  essentially  logical ;  but  his 
love  of  the  truth  appears  to  have  overcome  his  hatred 
of  a  contradiction  when  his  instinct  perceived  that 
both  individual  liberty  and  social  control  were  vital 
aspects  of  educational  verity.  Contradictory  or  not, 
the  two  aspects  had  to  be  brought  into  his  system  ; 
and  it  is  precisely  as  a  contradictory  system  that  it 
has  value.  It  asks  a  question  ;  it  poses  us  with  a 
paradox  ;  it  demands  a  further  solution.  What  is 
the  right  issue  of  the  struggle  between  individual 
freedom  and  social  constraint  ?  We  have  learned, 
by  now,  to  answer  the  question  with  a  formula  : 
Social  liberty  is  the  further  ideal.  But  it  is  one  thing 
to  have  stated  the  ideal,  and  another  to  realize  it. 
and  meanwhile  freedom  and  fellowship  are  still  at 
war.  Education  still  wonders  how  to  combine  the 
two  within  a  unified  doctrine.  The  resolvent  factors 
that  would  bring  them  into  union  have  yet  to  be 
completely  worked  out.  Some  of  these  factors  we 
shall  be  able  to  trace  in  the  work  of  later  educators  ; 
but  it  may  be  said  at  once  that  the  educational 
problem  of  the  relation  between  processes  of  drawing 
out  and  building  in  will  be  fully  solved  only  in  con¬ 
nection  with  the  wider  problem  of  individual  freedom 
in  relation  to  social  life.  In  considering,  in  the  next 
chapter,  the  strange  influence  of  Rousseau  upon 
European  thought  and  feeling,  we  shall  come  into 
closer  touch  with  this  problem,  if  not  with  its 
solution. 


64  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

Meanwhile  we  have  to  take  into  account  not  only 
the  individual  freedom  of  mind  and  spirit  that  Locke 
had  so  greatly  desired  for  himself,  and  now,  having 
attained  it  in  large  measure,  could  not  fail  to  provide 
for,  however  confusedly,  in  his  educational  scheme, 
but  also  the  primary  ideal  for  the  pursuit  of  which 
he  felt  such  freedom  to  be  essential.  Towards  what 
outlook  is  the  liberated  mind  of  the  child  to  be 
turned,  in  the  first  instance  ?  “  The  tutor  . . .  should 
acquaint  him  with  the  true  state  of  the  world  ;  and 
dispose  him  to  think  no  man  better  or  worse,  wiser 
or  foolisher,  than  he  really  is.”  This  to  begin  with  ; 
the  final  aim  is  foreshadowed  in  a  letter  to  Bolde, 
his  champion  in  matters  ecclesiastical :  “  Believe  it, 
my  good  friend,  to  love  truth  for  truth’s  sake  is  the 
principal  part  of  human  perfection  in  this  world  and 
the  seed-plot  of  all  other  virtues.”  Locke,  indeed, 
lived  to  rationalize  the  great  poetic  statement  of 
Chaucer  : — 

Hold  the  hye  way,  and  lat  thy  gost  thee  lede, 

And  Trouthe  shal  delivere,  hit  is  no  drede. 

This  passion  for  philosophic  truth,  if  it  can  scarcely 
be  classed  as  a  novel  inspiration  in  educational 
thought,  involves  the  raising  to  a  very  high  power, 
throughout  the  educational  equation,  of  one  of  its 
most  important  factors.  To  inspire  a  high  intel¬ 
lectual  sincerity  is  one,  though  only  one,  of  the 
ultimate  aims  of  education.  The  will  to  translate 
realized  truth  into  practical  morals,  and  the  power 


LOCKE  AND  THE  QUEST  OF  TRUTH  65 

of  the  emotions,  rightly  exercised,  to  warm  cold 
truth  and  morals  with  the  irradiation  of  beauty, 
have  also  to  be  developed  ;  but  both  the  moral  and 
the  aesthetic  faculties  are  dependent  upon  a  high 
sense  of  reality.  We  may  consider  that  Locke  gave 
to  philosophic  realism,  even  of  the  most  exalted 
kind,  too  isolated  a  splendour,  and  that  the  fullest 
development  of  his  educational  scheme  would  lack 
something  of  rounded  completeness ;  but  his 
specific  regard  for  verity  is  not  so  common  that  the 
teacher  can  neglect  its  implications  as  Locke  works 
them  out. 

The  idea  of  education  in  intellectual  sincerity 
leads  naturally  away  from  formalism  in  teaching. 
Sincerity  is  native  to  the  open,  not  to  the  shut-in 
mind,  and  Locke’s  treatment  of  knowledge  gives  a 
continual  impression  of  the  opening  of  doors  that 
formalists  of  all  ages  have  been  in  unconscious  con¬ 
spiracy  to  keep  tightly  closed .  He  is  no  Comenius, 
being,  indeed,  less  an  educator  than  a  thinker  who 
turns  aside  to  demand  from  education  the  reasonable 
minimum  of  open-mindedness  that  is  necessary  for 
clear  thought.  The  outcome,  in  his  sketch  of  method 
in  teaching,  is  rather  a  backing-up  of  “  modern  ” 
method  in  general  from  the  standpoint  of  a  scholar 
and  a  philosopher  than  any  new  synthesis  ;  but 
such  support  has  a  value  all  its  own. 

One  of  the  greatest  of  reasoners,  Locke  may  be 
expected  to  give  due  importance  to  training  in  logic 
and  in  power  of  statement.  He  does  so  ;  but  as  an 

F 


66  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

iconoclast  :  “  I  have  seldom  or  never  observed  any¬ 
one  to  get  the  skill  of  reasoning  well,  or  speaking 
handsomely,  by  studying  those  rules  which  pretend 
to  teach  it.”  For  style,  he  advocates  training  in 
oral  composition,  but  it  is  not  to  be  composition  in 
vacuo  :  “  Would  you  not  think  him  a  little  cracked, 
who  would  require  another  to  make  an  argument 
on  a  Moot  Point  who  understands  nothing  of  our 
laws  ?  ”  Our  own  too  common  abandonment  of 
composition  perhaps  suggests  that  we  have  been 
“  a  little  cracked  ”  in  that  respect ;  correlation 
between  subjects  set  for  composition  and  the  mental 
material  of  other  classes  leads  to  no  such  confession 
of  failure.  In  every  case  theory  is  made  to  reach 
down  to  the  root  facts  upon  which  it  is  based. 
Natural  philosophy  must  be  based  upon  “  rational 
experiments  and  observations  ”  rather  than  upon 
"  barely  speculative  systems.”  The  reading  of  Latin 
authors  is  to  be  prefaced  by  a  study  of  Roman 
history.  A  judicious  use  of  translations  is  all  to  the 
good  ;  as  for  formal  grammar  of  the  parrot-learnt 
kind,  “  there  is  more  stir  a  great  deal  made  with  it 
than  there  needs.”  Arithmetic,  "  the  easiest  and 
consequently  the  first  form  of  abstract  reasoning,” 
is  to  be  connected  for  concrete  material  with  the 
facts  and  figures  of  geography.  The  teacher  should 
make  the  child  comprehend  (as  much  as  may  be) 
the  usefulness  ”  of  what  he  is  taught,  "  and  let  him 
see  by  what  he  has  learned  that  he  can  do  something 
which  he  could  not  do  before.”  Those  who  see  no 


LOCKE  AND  THE  QUEST  OF  TRUTH  67 

practicable  transition  stage  between  education  in 
watertight  compartments,  as  largely  pursued  in  the 
public  schools,  and  the  unified,  co-ordinated  cur¬ 
riculum  of  the  developed  synthetic  method,  will  at 
least  have  the  quest  of  truth  for  justification  if  they 
go  back  to  Locke  for  their  preliminary  hints. 


VII 


ROUSSEAU  AND  SOCIAL  LIBERTY 

A  CERTAIN  type  of  education,  or  mis-education, 
may  be  crudely  compared  with  the  preparation 
of  the  bottle-gourd  for  the  simple  domestic  uses  to 
which  it  is  adapted  by  tropical  villagers.  The  young 
gourd  is  made  to  grow  into  a  predetermined  shape 
by  binding  it  where  a  constriction  is  wanted,  or  where 
a  protuberance  is  to  be  allowed  only  a  limited  degree 
of  expansion.  The  natural  contents  of  the  fruit  are 
removed  from  within  the  rind  by  a  gradual  process 
of  decomposition  and  erosion.  The  gourd  is  then 
made  a  receptacle  for  whatever  it  is  required  to  hold, 
or  it  is  left  empty  for  an  ornament. 

In  studying  the  ideals  and  schemes  of  the  past  it 
is  well  to  remember  that  the  kind  of  training  for 
which  the  bottle-gourd’s  education  furnishes  an 
extreme  symbol  was  always  tending  to  establish 
itself  at  the  instance  of  the  stupid  and  shortsighted 
and  with  the  acquiescence  of  the  ignorant.  True 
education  has  for  long  had  to  struggle  against  the 
dead  weight  of  this  tendency — to  labour  increas¬ 
ingly  for  the  leavening  of  that  inert  lump  of  opinion 
which  regards  schooling  only  as  machinery  to  pre- 

68 


ROUSSEAU  AND  SOCIAL  LIBERTY  69 

pare  the  new  generation  for  serving  the  dulled  pur¬ 
poses  of  the  old.  The  existence  of  the  struggle  and 
its  slowly  increasing  success  are  our  grounds  of  hope¬ 
fulness  for  the  education  of  the  future.  But  for  this 
we  might  wonder  whether  educational  idealism  were 
not  after  all  a  chimera,  since  educational  practice 
has  advanced  so  short  a  distance  along  the  roads 
marked  out  for  it  by  its  greatest  pioneers. 

Jean  Jacques  Rousseau  was  brought  up  practi¬ 
cally  without  education,  and  grew  up  a  critic,  but  a 
critic  without  a  criterion.  Just  as  sound  training  in 
early  youth  might  have  enabled  him  to  develop  into 
a  clean-living  and  an  honourable  man,  so  the 
experience  of  a  real  education  would  have  given  to 
his  genius  a  pivot  upon  which  to  turn  when  he  looked 
around  upon  the  results  of  false  education.  Un¬ 
centred,  he  tended  to  become  self-centred  ;  this  is 
clear  enough  in  respect  of  his  personal  life,  but  the 
observation  carries  us  further  when  we  apply  it  to 
his  impersonal  life — to  the  world  of  his  social  and 
humanitarian  passions.  The  first  question  for  the 
humanitarian  is — What  do  you  mean  by  humanity  ? 
L’humanite ,  cent  moi  would  have  been  the  truthful 
answer  for  Rousseau  to  give,  and  a  very  good 
answer,  within  limits — limits,  however,  which 
Rousseau  consistently  overstepped,  in  life  and 
thought  alike,  for  his  ego  reached  to  his  horizon. 
It  is  the  curse  of  Socialism  (in  the  wide  sense  of  that 
politically  besmirched  term)  that  so  many  of  its 
exponents  have  thought  first  and  last,  in  their  heart 


70  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

of  hearts,  of  society’s  duty  to  themselves.  Such  was 
the  outlook  that  Rousseau  inevitably  brought  to 
bear  upon  education,  as  upon  social  theory  as  a 
whole  ;  the  greater  pity  since  he  was  the  first,  as 
Mr.  Hudson  has  said,  who  “  approached  the  whole 
question  of  education  from  the  point  of  view  of 
social  theory.” 

Free  himself  in  a  sense,  though  tragically  unfitted 
to  use  freedom,  Rousseau  saw  the  world  around  him 
in  bonds  and  fetters  ;  whether  with  true  vision  or 
not  we  may  judge  by  the  extraordinary  spread  of 
his  influence.  In  the  matter  of  education  he  saw  all 
the  child-training  of  his  time  as  a  process  akin  to 
the  gourd-bottle  manufacture  of  our  metaphor  ; 
whether  his  view  was  distorted  or  not,  it  induced  in 
him  a  reaction  that  opened  his  eyes  to  a  fundamental 
truth.  Once  and  for  all  he  threw  aside  the  notion 
of  a  child’s  nature  as  a  shell  to  be  moulded,  hollowed 
out  and  filled  ;  natural  growth,  rightly  conditioned, 
was  the  only  education.  It  is  true  that  this  realiza¬ 
tion  had  impressed  itself  in  greater  or  less  degree 
upon  his  predecessors,  but  he  was  the  first  to  make 
of  it  an  absolute,  not  a  relative  doctrine  ;  and  it  is 
upon  absolutes  that  great  ideals  are  based.  Practice 
is  another  matter.  To  educate  solely  by  the  en¬ 
couragement  of  natural  growth  we  must  have  a 
system  of  educational  technique  completely  fitted 
to  that  end,  and  of  such  a  technique  Rousseau  had 
only  the  very  vaguest  inklings.  We  shall  have  to 
trace  in  succeeding  chapters  the  later  development, 


ROUSSEAU  AND  SOCIAL  LIBERTY  71 

in  other  and  more  capable  hands,  of  the  methodology 
that  he  lacked  ;  but  the  technique  of  education 
through  freedom  is  in  its  infancy  even  yet,  and, 
appropriately  enough,  has  scarcely  been  applied 
as  yet  to  the  training  of  any  but  the  youngest 
children.  Still,  it  was  Rousseau’s  absolute,  uncom¬ 
promising  statement  of  the  crude  ideal  and  its  wide 
acceptance,  even  in  all  its  crudity,  that  gave  impetus 
to  the  devising  of  method  ;  and  to-day,  so  far  as 
training  of  the  gourd-bottle  type  still  persists,  it  is 
more  and  more  on  sufferance  only,  a  makeshift 
awaiting  its  own  gradual  supersession. 

Many  critics  appear  to  have  found  it  extremely 
difficult  to  read  Rousseau  without  losing  their 
tempers  with  him.  There  is  every  reason  for  annoy¬ 
ance  when  a  man  of  genius  combines  an  unassailable 
principle  with  an  unjustifiable  way  of  life  ;  but  the 
spirit  of  annoyance  is  apt  to  reject  the  sound  prin¬ 
ciple  together  with  its  unsound  application.  Every 
actual  life  is  partly  justified  and  partly  condemned 
when  it  is  brought  under  the  scrutiny  of  ideals  ;  and 
Rousseau’s  way  of  life,  in  the  main  unjustifiable  as 
the  manifestation  of  a  monstrous  egoism,  finds  its 
partial  justification  in  the  ideal  of  liberty  for  the 
individual  ego..  Needless  to  say,  this  is  an  entirely 
sound  ideal ;  and  like  other  single  ideals  it  can  be 
realized  only  in  conjunction  with  others.  It  is  often 
maintained,  in  a  common  looseness  of  language,  that 
“  too  much  liberty  ”  is  bad  for  a  child,  or  for  anyone. 
But  there  is  no  such  thing  as  too  much  liberty.  There 


72  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

is  liberty,  and  there  is  constraint ;  and  everyone 
knows  that  in  the  abstract  liberty  is  the  better  of 
the  two.  The  practical  trouble  arises  when  there  is 
no  answer,  or  the  wrong  answer,  to  the  question, 
“  What  do  you  want  your  liberty  for  ?  What  would 
you  be  free  to  do,  or  think,  or  feel  ?  ”  This  is  where 
further  ideals  must  come  in,  without  which  we  have, 
not  “  too  much  liberty/’  but  an  imitation  that  is 
not  liberty  at  all.  It  is  these  further  ideals  which 
education  for  liberty  has  to  teach.  These  ideals 
Rousseau  lacked,  and  in  that  blindness  he  wrote 
of  liberty  as  though  it  were  the  only  ideal  in  the 
world. 

None  the  less  he  had  an  inborn  sense  of  the  beauty 
of  freedom  in  itself  which  even  the  misery  of  his  own 
misuse  of  freedom  could  not  destroy.  The  reader 
of  Rousseau  who  comes  to  the  appalling  fact  that 
the  apostle  of  education  in  freedom  left  his  own 
children  to  the  tender  mercies  of  a  public  orphanage 
is  apt  to  throw  down  the  book  in  disgust,  saying  that 
here  is  the  outcome  of  Rousseau’s  freedom-ideal — 
a  refusal  to  be  bothered  with  the  upbringing  of  his 
own  children.  But  it  is  more  true  to  say  that  he  was 
not  free  enough.  He  was  not  free  to  delight  in  the 
bringing-up  of  a  family.  He  himself  attributes  the 
fact  to  the  enslaved  social  order  of  his  times  ;  we 
can  see  that  it  was  also  his  own  fault,  in  that  he 
failed  to  practise  the  liberty  which  he  preached — 
the  liberty  of  fatherhood  to  bring  up  the  young  in 
freedom.  Our  moral  reprobation  must  not  attack 


ROUSSEAU  AND  SOCIAL  LIBERTY  73 

his  ideal,  but  the  selfishness,  idleness,  and  ignorance 
that  prevented  his  applying  it. 

Ignorant  liberty  is  no  liberty  at  all ;  education 
has  to  perfect  it  by  giving  knowledge.  Idle  liberty 
is  no  liberty  at  all ;  education  has  to  turn  it  into 
liberty  of  action  by  training  and  developing  the 
natural  human  desire  for  fruitful  activity.  Selfish 
liberty  is  liberty  shackled  by  the  bonds  of  self — a 
contradiction  in  terms.  Rousseau  himself  knew  well 
enough,  in  theory,  that  true  liberty  is  selfless  ;  that 
in  its  essence  it  depends  not  upon  the  individual  in 
himself  but  upon  the  relation  between  the  individual 
and  the  society.  True  liberty  is  social.  The  opposite 
view  that  a  man  is  nowhere  so  free  as  upon  a  desert 
island  exactly  misinterprets  the  nature  of  freedom. 
Robinson  Crusoe  was  not  free  to  exercise,  except 
in  prospective  or  retrospective  thought,  any  of  the 
social  faculties  which  are  man’s  highest  means  of 
self-expression.  If  such  deprivation  of  faculties  is 
freedom,  the  ultimate  liberty  would  be  complete 
annihilation. 

Rousseau  perceived  that  liberty  is  social ;  but, 
as  we  have  seen,  he  only  perceived  one  way  of  re¬ 
form  :  society  must  give  freedom  to  the  individual. 
It  is  equally  true  that  individuals  must  give  freedom 
to  society.  Liberation  can  only  be  effected  by  a 
society  that  knows  what  liberty  is  ;  and  such  a 
society  can  only  be  built  up  of  individuals  who  have 
won  their  freedom,  and  transfused  their  sense  of  it 
into  the  veins  of  the  community.  It  is  here  that  the 


74  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

part  which  education  has  to  play  becomes  apparent. 
Rousseau  only  saw  that  education,  the  message  of 
the  older  generation  to  the  younger,  must  be  a 
message  of  liberation.  He  failed  to  recognize  that 
education  must  also  teach  the  further  ideals  for  whose 
realization  liberty  is  to  be  used,  and  so  train  up 
individuals  who,  experiencing  true  liberty  in  them¬ 
selves  as  a  right  relation  with  the  community,  will 
pass  their  experience  into  the  common  stock  by 
giving  freedom  as  well  as  demanding  it. 

Two  factors  are  essential  in  the  realization  of  an 
ideal ;  the  ideal  itself,  and  the  actualities  of  the 
world  in  which  it  has  to  make  good  its  position.  We 
must  turn  to  the  successors  of  Rousseau  to  see  the 
ideal  of  education  in  freedom  brought  into  any 
relation  with  actuality.  Rousseau  stands  almost 
solely  for  the  ideal  itself,  and,  as  has  been  suggested, 
for  only  half  the  ideal  at  that.  Trained  in  another 
and  a  better  phase  of  Europe’s  history,  he  might  have 
given  to  Europe  a  wider  and  a  wiser  message.  Pre¬ 
revolutionary  France  turned  a  potential  philosopher 
into  a  fanatical  idealist.  Others  had  to  interpret 
the  ideal  which  he  saw  with  such  piercing  if  partial 
vision  ;  and  the  bloodstained  crudity  of  the  inter¬ 
pretation,  in  the  French  Revolution,  bears  witness 
to  the  lack  of  any  philosophy  of  freedom  to  which  an 
appeal  for  reason  could  have  been  made.  Even 
now,  when  we  are  in  the  midst  of  a  war  of  liberation, 
and  more  has  been  said  and  written  in  two  years 
about  the  philosophy  of  freedom  than  in  two 


ROUSSEAU  AND  SOCIAL  LIBERTY  75 

centuries,  perhaps,  before,  a  reverberation  of  the  old 
horror  of  anarchy  still  sounds  in  English  ears,  and 
something  in  us  still  shrinks  from  the  path  of 
liberty  as  though  it  were  the  way  of  destruction.  In 
our  dealings  with  children,  especially,  we  have  to 
unlearn  an  irrational  mistrust  of  freedom,  and  to 
rediscover  that  in  his  essential  position  Rousseau  was 
right  :  education  can  either  liberate  or  it  can  warp 
the  self-developing  nature  of  the  child.  It  cannot 
make  citizens  ;  it  can  spoil  them,  or  it  can  endue 
them  with  the  power  to  make  themselves. 

A  sporadic  modern  tendency  to  give  children  a 
freedom  as  blind  and  purposeless,  as  uneducated,  as 
Rousseau’s  own,  shows  our  reaction  from  mistrust 
of  liberty,  and  the  mistrustful  often  quote  the  un¬ 
ruly  modern  child  as  an  instance  of  the  dangers  of 
“  too  much  freedom.”  He  is,  on  the  contrary,  an 
instance  of  incomplete  freedom.  Uneducated 
liberty  has  nothing  to  work  upon,  and,  so  far,  is  not 
free  but  enslaved  to  self.  The  fact  that  we  still  have 
little  trace  of  a  system  of  education  for  liberty  is  due 
to  the  mistrustful  themselves.  They  retard  the  very 
ideal  whose  imperfection  they  decry. 

We  must  not  lose  sight  of  the  truth,  however,  that 
liberty  is  one  of  the  ultimate  ideals,  and  therefore 
not  a  thing  to  be  snatched  at  in  a  hurry.  Absolute 
liberty  can  come  only  with  absolute  perfection  ; 
and  we  win  relative  liberty  only  as  fast  as  we  can 
teach  ourselves  to  use  it.  Meanwhile  constraint 
has  its  lesser,  temporary  value  as  an  expedient, 


76  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

wherever  freedom  remains  still  untaught,  even  as 
fear  of  the  pains  of  evil  is  necessary  to  us  till  we 
learn  to  love  the  joys  of  good.  But  constraint  is 
subject  to  the  same  law  of  fellowship  that  applies, 
as  we  have  seen,  to  liberty. 

We  have  suggested  in  an  earlier  chapter  that  the 
contrast  between  training  by  means  of  free  develop¬ 
ment  and  training  through  constraint  is  naturally 
associated  with  the  contrast  between  the  individual 
and  the  social  aspects  of  life.  In  so  far  as  constraint 
is  necessary,  it  is  necessary,  or  justifiable,  only  when 
it  is  social  constraint.  Nursery  rules,  or  school  rules, 
are  the  rules  of  a  small  society,  and  the  keeping  of 
them  is  a  preparation  for  keeping  the  rules  of  a 
larger  society.  But  every  rational  mother  or  teacher, 
like  every  openminded  statesman  or  judge,  recog¬ 
nizes  rules  as  makeshifts.  There  is  nothing  ultimate 
about  them  ;  justice  demands  their  relaxation  or 
suspension  in  accordance  with  circumstances,  and 
their  only  criterion  is  the  highest  expediency.  This 
is  not  the  less,  but  the  greater,  reason  for  loyalty 
to  law.  If  we  disregard  an  ultimate,  it  remains  in 
spite  of  us  ;  if  we  break  a  sound  convention,  we 
destroy  a  link  in  the  chainwork  of  social  solidarity. 
But  for  Rousseau  the  chainwork  was  evil,  not  made 
up  of  living  links,  but  of  cold  metal  forged  upon  the 
limbs  of  the  unconsenting  many  by  the  powerful 
few.  Thus  law  ceased,  for  him,  to  be  a  social 
expression,  and  constraint  became  a  function  of 
unsocial  tyranny.  Can  we  not  argue  that,  as  in  pre- 


ROUSSEAU  AND  SOCIAL  LIBERTY  77 

revolutionary  France,  so  in  the  Europe  that  will 
have  to  be  reconstructed  after  the  Great  War,  con¬ 
straint  is  a  factor  in  civilized  life  which  it  should  be 
our  constant,  deliberate  effort  to  supersede  ?  To 
supersede,  not  to  abolish  without  replacement,  for 
that  way  lies  anarchy. 

If  so  education,  as  Rousseau  dimly  saw,  has  the 
principal  part  to  play  in  clearing  the  road  for  social 
liberty — that  true  and  only  liberty  in  which  the 
individual  and  the  society  are  at  one,  and  constraint 
gives  place  to  consent.  Merely  to  state  such  an 
ideal  is  to  demonstrate  its  Utopian  quality.  But 
there  is  nothing  wrong  with  an  Utopian  ideal  if  it 
is  a  true  one  ;  indeed,  all  great  ideals  are  Utopian. 
The  only  error  is  to  leave  out  any  of  the  slow,  neces¬ 
sary  steps  by  which  alone  they  can  gradually  be 
approached.  Rousseau  left  out  nearly  all  the  steps, 
and  his  plan  for  a  boy’s  education  leaves  the  reader 
with  the  uncomfortable  conviction  that  Emile  would 
in  the  end  have  fallen  into  most  of  the  pitfalls  that 
entrapped  his  creator.  It  was  left  for  Pestalozzi  to 
begin  the  building  of  a  safe  causeway  from  the 
actual  towards  the  ideal  and,  indeed,  to  start  his 
building  from  the  very  bedrock  of  stern  actuality. 


VIII 


PESTALOZZTS  WORK 

SPARKS  from  the  smoky  fire  of  Rousseau’s  genius 
fell  in  many  directions,  sometimes  with  illu¬ 
minating,  sometimes  with  incendiary  effect.  The 
young  Pestalozzi  appears  to  have  caught  the  clearer 
gleam  ;  for,  although  we  learn  from  Henning  that 
in  his  early  zeal  on  behalf  of  the  poor  and  the 
oppressed  he  came  near  to  justifying  assassination  in 
the  cause  of  reform,  we  know  from  his  own  words 
that  he  turned  readily  to  the  more  excellent  way, 
the  way  of  education,  on  reading  Emile  : — 

The  home  as  well  as  the  public  education  of  the 
whole  world,  and  of  all  ranks  of  society,  appeared 
to  me  altogether  as  a  crippled  thing,  which  was  to 
find  a  universal  remedy  for  its  present  pitiful 
condition  in  Rousseau’s  lofty  ideas.  The  ideal 
system  of  liberty,  also,  to  which  Rousseau  im¬ 
parted  fresh  animation,  increased  in  me  the 
visionary  desire  for  a  more  extended  sphere  of 
activity,  in  which  I  might  promote  the  welfare 
and  the  happiness  of  the  people. 

7S 


PESTALOZZI’S  WORK 


79 

Here  we  have  again,  in  youthful  phrase,  the  wider 
ideal  of  Comenius,  the  greater  outlook  upon  educa¬ 
tion  as  the  service  of  humanity,  not  merely  as  that 
culture  of  a  superior  caste  which  sufficed  for  the 
educational  idealism  of  Milton  and  Locke. 

The  service  of  humanity  at  large  offers  a  dangerous 
and  an  ill-rewarded  career — ill-rewarded,  if  we 
reckon  its  reward  in  terms  of  material  prosperity  ; 
and  Pestalozzi  had  not  only,  like  Comenius,  many 
vicissitudes  to  endure,  but  also  much  contempt  and 
misunderstanding  to  overcome.  Perhaps  the  highest 
testimonial  to  his  character  and  to  the  quality  and 
permanence  of  his  enthusiasm  is  to  be  found  in  the 
effect  upon  him  of  his  greatest  apparent  failure.  In 
the  farm  school  which  he  started  at  Neuhof  he  took 
advantage  of  the  local  custom  of  handing  over  waifs 
and  orphans  to  the  agricultural  peasantry — often 
to  be  wretchedly  exploited  as  drudges  or  even  as 
beggars — to  attempt  the  building  up  of  a  model 
school  with  these  poor  castaways  for  its  human 
material.  Judged  by  the  standard  of  human  values, 
the  experiment  was  a  great  vindication  of  his 
principles  ;  but  it  was  not,  as  it  was  intended  to  be, 
self-supporting  (largely,  it  is  true,  because  of  Pesta- 
lozzi’s  innate  incapacity  for  business  management)  ; 
his  children  were  decoyed  from  him  as  his  efforts 
raised  them  from  their  helpless  squalor  to  the 
wage-earning  level ;  subscriptions  that  buoyed  up 
the  work  for  a  time  eventually  fell  off  ;  and  the  end 
was  ignominious  collapse.  But  writing,  in  later 


80  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

years,  of  this  time  he  could  say  :  "In  the  struggle 
in  which  this  attempt  involved  me  I  had  learned  a 
vast  deal  of  truth,  and  I  was  never  more  fully  con¬ 
vinced  of  the  importance  of  my  views  and  plans 
than  at  the  moment  when  they  seemed  to  be  for 
ever  set  at  rest  by  total  failure.”  "  There  was  no 
'  total  failure  ’  in  the  matter,”  comments  Mr.  Holman, 
in  his  illuminating  account  of  Pestalozzi’s  life 
and  work,  “  for  over  a  hundred  children  had  been 
rescued  from  ignorance  and  poverty  and  degrada¬ 
tion.”  There  was  the  inner  certainty  of  a  success 
greater  than  the  failure,  a  success  upon  which  his 
later  and  completer  work  was  ultimately  founded. 

Unlike  Rousseau,  Pestalozzi  had  had  as  the  basis 
of  his  nurture  the  inestimable  groundwork  of  a 
mother’s  understanding  care  ;  and  it  was  upon  this 
foundation  that  he  fell  back  for  the  expression  of  his 
educational  ideal  during  the  years  of  poverty  and 
contempt  that  ensued.  Leonayd  and  Gertrude, 
a  naively  beautiful  story  of  the  spread  of  a  single 
mother’s  influence  over  a  whole  community,  brought 
to  him,  as  to  the  Gertrude  of  his  book,  a  wider  fame 
than  he  had  dreamed  of  attaining.  Its  contem¬ 
porary  effect  was  comparable  with  that  of  Emile, 
and  though  the  hope  of  its  sub-title,  "  A  Book  for 
the  People,”  was  hardly  realized  in  the  sense  that 
its  educational  import  was  generally  understood,  it 
still  led  to  real  popular  benefit  by  turning  the  minds 
of  educated  social  thinkers  and  workers  towards 
fruitful  fields  of  educational  practice.  The  great 


PESTALOZZrS  WORK 


8 1 


principle  which  emerges  in  the  Bonnal  schoo 
of  Pestalozzi’s  imagining — a  school  that  grows 
naturally,  in  the  story,  out  of  such  needs  as  he  had 
realized  day  by  day  among  his  neighbours  and  com¬ 
panions  in  poverty — is  that  popular  education  must 
take  the  life  of  the  people  where  it  finds  it,  and  in 
awakening  and  developing  the  minds  of  children 
must  keep  them  in  touch  with  the  domestic  realities 
among  which  they  are  growing  up,  and  in  whose 
eventual  reform  their  training  is  to  make  its  social 
value  manifest.  This  principle  has  an  equal  claim 
to  recognition  in  our  own  day,  whatever  the  im¬ 
provement,  materially,  in  the  condition  of  our 
masses  as  compared  with  that  of  the  Neuhof  peasants 
in  1780.  There  is  sound  criticism  lurking  inarticu¬ 
late  behind  the  old-fashioned  Philistine  objection 
to  “  all  this  Board  School,  piano-playing  nonsense.' ” 
It  is  of  no  use  to  whirl  the  child,  bewildered  if 
delighted,  through  half-comprehended  realms  of 
knowledge,  mental  activity,  and  enlightenment, 
only  to  drop  him  back  at  the  end  of  it  all  into  the 
old  drab,  aimless,  unexplained  environment,  critical, 
disillusioned  perhaps,  but  with  no  idea  in  his  mind 
of  what  it  needs  for  betterment.  This  is  worse  than 
useless,  it  is  cruel ;  even  worse  than  cruel,  it  is 
stupid,  with  a  stupidity  that  bears  harsh  fruit  in  the 
blind  revolts  and  treacheries  that  come  of  an  in¬ 
articulate  discontent.  Our  elementary  education 
has  perhaps  begun  to  learn  that  it  must  take  heed 
of  and  walk  hand  in  hand  with  the  daily  life  of  the 

G 


82  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


people,  and  that  the  vistas  it  opens  up,  to  have  any 
reality,  must  be  visible  from  the  kitchen  fireside  at 
home  ;  but  the  lesson  is  very  far  indeed  from  being 
taken  completely  to  heart.  No  syllabus  should  fail 
to  prescribe  the  connection  of  school  interests  with 
home  facts,  and  the  systematic  explanation  of  local 
conditions,  local  affairs,  local  hopes  and  prospects, 
in  relation  to  the  more  general  ideas  and  ideals  that 
are  gradually  being  fostered  in  the  modern  elemen¬ 
tary  school.  Nor  are  our  public  schools,  except  in 
so  far  as  the  infrequent  social  wisdom  of  individual 
teachers  can  operate,  any  too  ready  to  equip  the 
coming  masters  of  the  social  complex  with  mental 
connections  between  general  theory  and  present 
reality. 

The  author  of  Leonard  and  Gertrude,  now  well 
established  in  reputation,  was  able  to  offer  his 
services  as  an  educator  to  the  enthusiasts  of  the 
Helvetic  Republic  with  certainty  of  acceptance. 
The  concluding  phase,  long  and  fruitful,  of  his  life- 
work,  in  the  schools  of  Stanz,  Burgdorf,  and  Yver- 
dun,  was  in  effect  the  resumption  and  extension  of 
his  earlier  labour  of  love  at  Neuhof,  successful  now 
in  every  sense,  despite  recurrent  difficulties  due  to 
what  he  himself  described  as  “  my  unrivalled  in¬ 
capacity  to  govern.”  The  detail  of  the  methodology 
that  he  developed  in  these  schools  repays  careful 
study  by  modern  teachers  ;  but  we  are  more  con¬ 
cerned  for  our  present  purpose  with  the  few  broad 
principles  upon  which  it  was  based.  These  cannot 


PESTALOZZFS  WORK  83 

be  better  indicated  than  in  Pestalozzi’s  own  words  : 
“  Try,  first,  to  broaden  your  children’s  sympathies, 
and,  through  satisfying  their  daily  needs,  to  bring 
love  and  kindness  into  such  unceasing  association 
with  their  impressions  and  activity  that  these  senti¬ 
ments  may  be  engrafted  in  their  hearts.”  A  peren¬ 
nial  precept  this,  easier  to  utter  than  to  carry  out  ; 
but  the  student  of  Pestalozzi’s  work  knows  with 
what  richness  of  devotion  it  was  carried  out.  "  The 
further  development  of  those  feelings  requires  the 
highest  art  of  education.  .  .  .  Here  you  must  not 
trust  to  nature  ;  you  must  do  all  that  is  in  your 
power  to  supply  the  place  of  her  henceforth  blind 
guidance,  by  the  wisdom  of  experience.”  In  this 
the  disciple  of  Rousseau  transcends  the  pure 
naturalism  of  his  earlier  master  ;  transcends,  for  the 
method  must  lose  nothing  of  naturalism  while  com¬ 
bining  with  it  the  teaching  of  experience  and 
authority  : — 

Man  readily  accepts  what  is  good,  and  the  child 
willingly  listens  to  it  ;  but  it  is  not  for  your  sake 
that  he  desires  it,  master  and  educator,  but  for  his 
own.  The  good  to  which  you  wish  to  direct  him 
must  not  depend  upon  your  varying  moods  and 
temper  ;  it  must  be  a  good  which  is  good  in  itself 
and  in  the  nature  of  things,  and  which  the  child 
can  recognize,  for  itself,  as  good. 

Here  we  have  the  true  reconciliation  between 
freedom  and  authority  in  educational  method,  at 


84  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

any  rate  as  regards  the  relation  between  the  teacher 
and  the  individual  child.  This  is  not  of  course  the 
only  relation  that  appears  in  school  work,  and  it 
remained  for  Froebel  to  think  out  the  position  of  the 
teacher  as  interpreter  of  a  social  authority  ;  but  it 
is  the  relation  that  has  first  to  be  taken  into  account. 
A  teacher’s  authority  either  disappears  or  becomes 
blindly  coercive  unless  its  relation  to  the  will  of  the 
individual  child,  including  the  child’s  will  to  freedom, 
is  of  the  right  kind. 

The  relation  between  teacher  and  child  is  wrong 
if  the  child  does  and  learns  and  thinks  what  he  is 
told  for  the  teacher’s  sake,  not  for  his  own  ;  this  is 
the  first  point  of  Pestalozzi’s  statement.  It  is  quite 
as  wrong  in  its  consequences,  though  less  obviously 
so  in  the  actual  process  of  teaching,  if  the  teacher’s 
constraining  will  is  exercised  not  through  force  or 
threat  of  force  but  through  a  talent  for  persuasive¬ 
ness — that  "  strong  personality  ”  which  is  often 
supposed  to  be  an  essential  part  of  the  teacher’s 
equipment.  To  hear  many  people  talk,  one  would 
imagine  that  only  those  endowed  with  a  magnetic 
personality  should  be  allowed  to  teach  at  all :  a 
ruling  which,  if  carried  into  effect,  would  reduce  the 
numbers  of  the  teaching  profession  seriously.  Al¬ 
most  the  exact  opposite  is  the  case.  Education  is 
not  a  hypnotic  process  ;  and  people  of  a  compelling 
personality  do  as  much  harm  as  good  by  their  teach¬ 
ing  unless  they  know  how  to  keep  personal  influences 
very  much  in  the  background.  Otherwise  they 


PESTALOZZFS  WORK  85 

teach  children  not  to  desire  knowledge  and  wisdom, 
but  to  please  people  whom  it  is  an  easy  delight  to 
please  and  to  take  little  trouble  to  please  anyone 
else.  The  children  are  learning,  of  course,  inciden¬ 
tally,  but  they  ought  to  be  learning  directly,  not 
incidentally.  Their  incentive  to  learn,  if  it  is  to 
have  any  permanence,  must  be  a  developing  desire 
for  knowledge  and  wisdom,  not  the  ulterior  motive 
of  pleasing  a  particular  type  of  person  ;  for  when 
they  pass  out  of  the  region  of  this  personal  influence 
they  have  no  enthusiasm  in  themselves,  of  their  own 
creating,  to  carry  them  onward,  and  easily  sink  back 
into  indifference. 

What,  then,  is  to  be  the  teacher’s  authority  over 
the  child,  if  it  is  to  operate  neither  by  coercion  nor 
by  an  irresistible  persuasion  that  is  a  form  of  coercion 
quite  as  effective  as  force  in  providing  children  with 
a  false  and  impermanent  motive  for  doing  as  they 
ought  ?  Pestalozzi’s  view  is  that  he  must  point  the 
child  to  something  that  is  "good  in  itself”:  so 
obviously  good  that  the  child  will  wish  for  guidance 
and  control  to  help  him  to  reach  it.  It  is  always  use¬ 
ful  to  ask  oneself,  over  any  difficulty  in  getting  a 
child  to  obey,  “  To  what  goal  have  I  pointed  ?  To¬ 
wards  what  good  am  I  telling  him  to  reach  out  ?  ” 
Usually  we  find  either  that  no  good  motive  has  been 
invoked  or  that  the  good  to  be  reached  through 
obedience  has  not  been  made  comprehensible  to  the 
child.  There  are  times,  of  course,  when  this  good 
cannot  be  explained  ;  the  issue  is  too  complex,  or 


86  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

the  case  is  one  of  emergency,  or  the  morale  of  the 
class  is  involved  ;  but  collapse  of  the  teacher  s 
authority  at  such  times  is  precisely  an  indication 
that  he  has  failed  to  explain  the  good  when  it  could 
be  explained,  and  so  has  failed  to  build  up  a  trust 
in  his  authority  as  something  that  can  be  relied  upon 
to  point  towards  good. 

This  principle  can  be  misused.  In  attempting  to 
explain  the  good  to  a  child  in  terms  that  he  can 
understand,  it  is  fatally  easy  to  point  to  a  shallow 
outside  motive  for  doing  a  right  action  or  working 
hard  to  learn  an  important  lesson.  This  nearly 
always  fails,  because  children  have  an  almost  in¬ 
fallible  instinct  for  seeing  through  this  kind  of 
sophistry,  though  they  may  seldom  be  able  to  dis¬ 
comfit  us  by  putting  their  sense  of  the  falsity  in  a 
proffered  motive  into  words.  The  good  to  which 
we  point  has  to  be  the  real,  essential  good  of  the 
action  that  the  child  is  to  do  ;  the  importance  of  his 
lesson  has  to  be  its  true  importance,  so  far  as  he  can 
understand  these  things.  How  are  we  to  get  it  ex¬ 
pressed  ?  Pestalozzi  does  not  fail  us  in  this  very 
practical  region.  We  must  point  to  a  good  that  is 
“  in  the  nature  of  things.”  Children,  with  all  their 
imaginativeness  (perhaps  because  of  it),  are  invin¬ 
cible  realists,  and  the  appeal  to  reality  seldom  fails. 
But  this  presupposes  two  conditions  :  that  the 
child’s  teaching  is  being  kept  in  close  touch  with 
reality,  as  was  the  teaching  of  Pestalozzi’s  pupils, 
and  that  the  teacher  is  open-minded  enough,  uni- 


PESTALOZZI’S  WORK 


87 

versalist  enough,  to  perceive  what  is  “  the  nature 
of  things  ”  in  relation  to  the  child’s  problem.  Some 
teachers  have  a  delightful  power  of  ready  explana¬ 
tion  along  these  lines,  and  it  is  often  thought  that 
they  must  be  very  clever  and  quick-witted  ;  but  the 
faculty  is  chiefly  the  fruit  of  effective  practice.  It 
is  the  Comenian  education,  or  self-education,  that 
leads  to  the  natural  discipline  exercised  by  the 
disciple  of  Pestalozzi. 

The  good  towards  which  we  have  to  direct  the 
steps  of  children,  the  good  which  the  child  can 
recognize  for  himself  as  good,  must  be  a  good  of 
which  the  child  can  see  the  point  ;  and  the  primary 
point  is  that  which  penetrates  the  child’s  sense  of 
what  is  worth  his  while.  But  it  is  easy  to  adopt  too 
low  a  standard  for  the  good  that  a  child  will  think 
worth  his  while.  The  acute,  innate,  childish  sense 
that  rejects  an  unreal  motive  for  doing  what  the 
teacher  wants  done,  also  rejects  the  proffered  good 
that  is  translated  into  terms  which  make  it  seem 
too  easy  of  attainment.  Some  providence  so  directs 
our  evolution  that  children  are  possessed  of  a  very 
strong  instinctive  feeling  that  nothing  is  greatly 
worth  while  which  does  not  cost  an  effort.  Modern 
attempts  at  education  in  freedom  are  apt  to  with¬ 
draw  coercive  discipline  without  substituting  the 
better  alternative  of  self-discipline.  Children  are 
either  disciplined,  self-disciplined,  or  undisciplined 
and  fundamentally  unhappy  ;  and  the  last  state  is 
worse  than  the  first.  Self-discipline  is  only  pro- 


88  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


moted  by  pointing  the  child’s  way  to  a  good  that  he 
can  see  to  be  difficult,  though  he  must  also  see  it  to 
be  not  impossible.  This  is  the  method  that  enables 
the  child  to  feel  that  he  is  doing  something  truly 
worth  while. 

For  a  final  quotation  we  may  choose  a  sentence 
which  is  a  veritable  foundation-stone  in  the  building 
up  of  educational  method,  since  without  arousing 
the  will  to  learn  no  teacher  can  do  anything  : — 

Whatever  (the  child)  does  gladly,  whatever 
brings  him  credit,  whatever  helps  him  to  realize 
his  greatest  hopes,  whatever  rouses  his  powers 
and  enables  him  to  say  with  truth  I  can — these 
things  he  wills. 

Such  principles  do  not  call  for  an  easy  lip-service, 
nor  even  alone  for  careful  study  of  the  practice  by 
which  Pestalozzi  began  to  give  them  effect ;  they 
call  for  an  effort  of  constructive  thought  from  the 
humblest  teacher — and  still  more  so  from  the  less 
humble — that  their  application  to  the  needs  and 
circumstances  of  his  own  day  may  be  worked  out  in 
every  possible  connection.  Such  was  the  way  of 
Froebel,  Pestalozzi’s  disciple,  and  his  eventual 
successor  as  a  light  in  the  educational  firmament, 
to  whom  our  next  chapter  must  be  devoted. 


IX 


THE  CREED  OF  FROEBEL 

O  base  an  educational  system  upon  a  prior 


1  assumption  is  to  invite  misunderstanding  of 
the  most  natural  and  inevitable  kind  from  those  whose 
prior  assumptions  are  different.  Such  misunder¬ 
standing  has  been  the  lot  of  all  great  educators  in 
the  degree  to  which  the  a  priori  element  has  been 
fundamental  to  the  logic  of  their  systems — and  no 
vital  argument  can  avoid  the  a  priori  element 
altogether.  The  argument  for  universalism  as 
Comenius  understood  it  is  rooted  in  the  assumption 
that  the  widest  possible  knowledge  of  the  universe  is 
the  province  of  education  ;  and  those  who  assume 
that  education  is  solely  a  mental  gymnastic,  for  which 
a  few  “  subjects  ”  are  more  effectual  than  many, 
simply  decline  to  follow  an  argument  which  would 
show  that  the  ablest  intellectual  gymnast  is  quite 
capable  of  being  and  remaining  an  exceedingly 
ignorant  person.  Froebel’s  educational  argument 
was  rooted  in  two  assumptions  which  many  people 
do  not  treat  as  fundamental  :  that  “  the  desire  for 
unity  is  the  basis  of  all  genuinely  human  develop¬ 
ment  and  cultivation;’  and  that  “the  child  is  the 


90  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

chief  agent  in  his  own  development.”  Acting  upon 
the  first  assumption  he  carried  to  a  further  pitch  of 
realization  the  “  pansophic  ”  ideal  of  Comenius  ,* 
acting  upon  the  second,  he  took  on  from  the  hands 
of  Pestalozzi  the  task  of  realizing  in  practice  the 
cloudy  ideal  of  Rousseau.  As  the  result  of  both 
inspirations  he  has  left  behind  him  a  method¬ 
ology  that  has  been  widely  adopted  with  some¬ 
what  rare  understanding  of  its  full  meaning  and 
purpose. 

Froebel  s  almost  esoteric  belief  in  unity  was  early 
applied  to  educational  criticism.  While  he  was  teach¬ 
ing  in  a  private  school  in  Berlin  to  support  himself 
during  a  period  of  attendance  at  lectures  the  lack 
of  co-ordination  in  the  system  to  which  he  was  sub¬ 
ject  troubled  him  continually.  “  Everywhere,”  he 
says,  “  I  sought  for  recognition  of  the  quickening 
interconnection  of  parts,  and  for  the  exposition  of 
the  inner  all-pervading  rule  of  law  ” — and  in  vain. 
On  taking  the  responsibilities  of  a  private  tutor  at 
the  age  of  twenty-five  and  trying  to  get  his  function 
clear  in  his  own  mind,  he  was  depressed  by  “  the 
utter  absence  of  any  organized  connection  between 
the  subjects  of  education.”  A  year  later  he  took  his 
three  pupils  to  Pestalozzi’s  school  at  Yverdun,  where 
he  worked  and  studied  for  two  years.  “  I  passed  a 
glorious  time  at  Yverdun,”  he  wrote  later,  "  elevated 
in  tone  and  critically  decisive  for  my  after  life.  At 
its  close,  however,  I  felt  more  clearly  than  ever  the 
deficiency  of  inner  unity  and  interdependence.” 


91 


THE  CREED  OF  FROEBEL 

Pestalozzi’s  genius  was  of  another  order  than  the 
constructive.  Froebel  felt  that  each  separate 
branch  of  education  was  in  such  a  condition  as  to 
interest  powerfully  but  never  wholly  to  content  the 
observer,  since  it  prepared  only  further  division  and 
separation.”  Diversity  of  interest  was  beginning 
to  outstrip  unity  of  treatment,  as  in  the  days  of 
Comenius.  This,  as  we  have  seen  elsewheie,  is  a 
natural  process.  Diversity  springs  of  its  own 
accord  from  the  ever-branching  activities  of  man  , 
the  educational  unities  have  to  be  thought  out  in 
time  to  keep  pace  with  it,  and  as  very  few  people 
take  the  trouble  to  do  this  thinking,  and  these  few 
meet  with  only  a  slow  and  a  reluctant  attention  fiom 
the  rest,  unity  is  always  apt  to  get  behindhand,  so 
that  diversity  becomes  division  and  deadness.  Such 
was  the  truth  of  which  Froebel  became  aware  \  and 
it  came  to  him  with  the  ring  of  a  spiritual  call.  He 
became  impelled  to  preach  the  gospel  of  unity, 
“  with  all  the  force  both  of  my  pen  and  of  my  life, 
in  the  shape  of  an  educational  system. 

A  genuinely  synthetic  method  in  education  can 
only  be  constructed  about  a  nucleus.  The  Hellenic 
synthesis  was  centred  in  an  aesthetic  ,  the  beautiful, 
in  the  widest  sense,  was  its  ultimate  sanction.  The 
synthesis  of  which  Locke’s  system  is  a  type  was 
centred  in  the  root  desire  of  the  human  mind  for 
truth.  Our  own  system,  in  so  far  as  we  possess  one, 
has  been  centred  in  a  kind  of  highest  common  factor 
of  prevailing  morals,  not  going  very  far  or  very  deep, 


92  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

but  pragmatically  effective  so  far  as  it  does  extend. 
For  an  intellectual  as  distinct  from  this  vaguely 
moralist  centre  we  contend  with  one  another  in 
needless  controversy  between  literature  and  science 
— the  twin  nuclei  for  any  live  interpretation  of 
human  existence.  And  the  issue  of  this  controversy 
is  furthered  narrowed  by  specialists  :  the  writer  has 
heard  it  cogently  argued  that  geography  is  the  only 
possible  co-ordination  centre  for  a  sanely  devised 
curriculum.  Froebel’s  philosophy  of  education 
relates  the  whole  question  to  a  different  region  of 
practical  thought.  To  his  mind  the  first  question 
for  the  educator  was  not  “  What  shall  we  teach  ?  ” 
Comenius  had  long  ago  endeavoured  “  to  search  out 
and  discover  a  rule  in  accordance  with  which 
teachers  teach  less  and  learners  learn  more,”  and 
had  based  his  system  upon  the  dictum  "  Children 
learn  to  do  by  doing.”  Froebel  gave  fuller  content 
to  the  motto  by  changing  it  to  “  Children  grow  by 
doing.”  Activity  is  the  only  educative  process,  and 
all  teaching  must  be  judged  by  the  extent  to  which 
it  induces  vital  activity  on  the  part  of  the  child. 
From  hour  to  hour  the  teacher  needs  to  ask  himself 
as  he  surveys  his  class,  “Are  they  passive  or 
active  ?  ”  But  this  is  only  the  beginning. 

Froebel’s  further  criterion  was,  first,  the  quality, 
and,  second,  the  tendency  of  the  child’s  activity. 
There  is  a  manifest  danger  in  centring  educational 
values  in  the  activity  of  the  individual  child.  Such 
a  basis  is  incalculably  harmful  if  the  child  becomes 


THE  CREED  OF  FROEBEL 


93 


aware  of  it,  as  children  do,  and  learns  to  regard  his 
own  little  self-centred  vortex  of  thoughts  and  feel¬ 
ings  as  the  main  thing  that  matters.  The  activity 
must  be  made  social.  “  The  Kindergarten,”  said 
Froebel,  “is  the  free  republic  of  childhood.”  But 
the  social  element  implies  social  control,  and  he  adds 
that,  “  If  national  order  is  to  be  recognized  as  a 
benefit  in  later  years,  children  must  first  be  accus¬ 
tomed  to  law  and  order,  and  therein  find  the  means 
of  freedom.”  And  the  teacher  must  be  felt  as  the 
interpreter,  not  the  arbitrary  inventor,  of  the  social 
law  that  reigns  in  the  small  community.  “  Between 
educator  and  pupil,  between  request  and  obedience, 
there  should  rule  invisibly  a  third  something  to 
which  educator  and  pupil  are  equally  subject.”  We 
have  seen  in  the  last  chapter  that  the  “  third  some¬ 
thing,”  between  the  educator  and  the  pupil  as  two 
individuals,  is  the  ultimate  good  towards  which  the 
teacher  has  to  point  the  child’s  way.  We  have  now 
a  second  aspect  of  the  relation  between  teacher  and 
child  :  that  in  which  the  child  is  a  member  of  a 
fellowship,  and  the  teacher  a  mouthpiece  of  the  laws 
of  fellowship.  Fellowship  itself  is  in  this  case  the 
good  which  he  invokes. 

But  fellowship  is  only  a  word  till  the  beauty  of  its 
meaning  has  been  realised  in  life.  What  is  there  in 
the  child’s  own  mind  that  we  can  appeal  to,  what 
principle  which  he  will  recognize  as  meriting  obedi¬ 
ence  for  its  own  sake  ?  This  “  third  something  ” 
might  be  partially  defined  as  the  child’s  community- 


94  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

sense  of  what  is  best,  a  sense  which  no  normal  child, 
habituated  to  the  quiet,  simple  appeal  to  his  reason, 
fails  to  evince.  We  use  such  an  appeal  continually  ; 
but,  like  the  appeal  to  the  ultimate  good  of  the 
individual  child,  it  is  fatally  easy  to  use  in  a  wrong 
and  shallow  way,  and  a  way  that  the  child  knows  at 
the  back  of  his  mind  to  be  wrong  and  shallow.  The 
standard  implied  in  the  warning,  “  That  sort  of 
thing  is  not  done,”  is  a  low  standard  ;  it  is  purely 
negative,  and  we  require  positive  standards.  The 
appeal  to  reason  that  takes  the  form,  “  Think  what 
it  would  be  like  if  everybody  did  that  !  ”  is  better, 
especially  when  the  “  that  ”  referred  to  is  an  obvi¬ 
ously  anti-social  action  ;  but  it  still  errs  on  the  nega¬ 
tive  side.  It  is  a  good  to  be  gained,  not  merely  an 
evil  to  be  avoided,  that  must  be  made  the  objective 
of  the  child’s  social  sense.  The  positive  feeling  to 
be  aroused  is  his  natural  instinct  of  helpfulness. 
Ihe  call  of  social  duty  can  nearly  always  be  trans¬ 
lated  into  a  call  to  "  come  and  help  a  call  that 
draws  the  child  out  of  self-preoccupation  into  a 
recognition  that  others  have  need  of  him.  But  the 
need  must  be  genuine,  not  trumped  up  for  the 
occasion  ;  and  this  presupposes  a  school  in  which 
the  activities  of  the  children  have  been  made 
genuinely  social,  as  they  are  made  by  Froebel’s 
system.  Needless  to  say,  there  are  headstrong 
moments  when  the  quiet  call  to  a  child’s  immature 
social  sense  will  not  be  effectual  all  at  once.  There 
are  often  moments  for  the  teacher  when  the  social 


THE  CREED  OF  FROEBEL  95 

law  must  be,  as  Froebel  says,  “  firmly  and  sternly 
emphasized,”  but  these  will  be  educationally  valu¬ 
able  only  in  so  far  as  their  appeal  for  the  child,  in 
retrospect,  is  the  appeal  from  Philip  drunk  to 
Philip  sober. 

The  social  spontaneity  that  is  the  essence  of  real 
freedom  is  still  only  the  means  to  Froebel’s  end,  only 
the  distinguishing  quality  of  the  free  activity  in 
which  he  so  deeply  believed.  “  Children  grow  by 
doing  ”  ;  and,  because  of  his  belief  that  the  character 
and  direction  of  their  growth  could  only  be  perman¬ 
ently  conditioned  by  activity  chosen  and  willed  by 
themselves,  he  made  their  choice  and  will,  at  each 
of  the  successive  stages  of  its  active  development, 
the  true  central  nucleus  around  which  his  system 
crystallized.  The  right  things  to  teach,  at  any  stage, 
were  the  things  that  gave  to  free  activity  the  greatest 
vitality  and  scope  and  the  widest  promise  of  further 
extension.  The  universalism  of  Comenius  here  finds 
its  nucleus  and  its  new  justification  in  the  demand 
of  growing  child-nature  for  a  complete  and  a  many- 
sided  self-realization,  and  a  self-realization  within 
a  social  order.  Merely  to  state  such  a  criterion  is  to 
suggest  an  enormous  potential  range  of  subject- 
matter,  but  also  to  set  a  rational  and  a  natural 
boundary  to  its  presentation  at  any  given  moment. 
The  Comenian  precept  was,  in  effect,  “  Teach  every¬ 
thing  ”  ;  and  teachers  not  unnaturally  quailed  be¬ 
fore  the  task.  Froebel’s  emendation  might  be  taken 
to  read,  ”  Teach  everything  through  which  your 


96  permanent  values  in  education 

child  can  fruitfully  exercise  and  develop  his  own 
activity  ”  ;  and  this  makes  the  apparent  demand 
upon  the  teacher  far  less  exacting. 

The  real  demand,  however,  goes  deeper  than 
many  of  Froebel’s  followers  have  realized.  It  is  a 
demand  not  for  universalized  knowledge,  but  for 
universalized  interest.  To  be  the  right  leader  for 
the  enthusiastic  activities  of  the  ideal  Froebel  class 
the  teacher  must  be  the  most  keenly  interested 
person  present  ;  otherwise  the  keenest  child  in  the 
class  would  be  a  better  leader  than  he.  This  is  not 
to  say  that  his  personality  must  provide  a  continual 
stimulus  to  enthusiasm.  A  great  deal  of  valuable 
educational  energy  is  wasted  in  the  attempt  to  im¬ 
pose  adult  enthusiasms  upon  immature  minds.  The 
more  disinterested  in  a  sense,  and  in  a  sense  the  more 
detached  the  teacher  is,  the  better.  He  has  to  show 
exactly  the  type  of  interest  that  he  expects  from  the 
children,  at  a  remove  from  their  own  that  is  within 
their  comprehension  and  only  just  outside  their 
reach  ;  and  to  show  it  he  has  to  possess  it.  To 
realize  in  any  degree  Froebel’s  concept  of  the  unity 
of  knowledge  he  has  to  develop  the  habit  of  mind 
that  seeks  connections  everywhere  and  refers  every¬ 
thing  to  its  simplest  fundamentals  ;  this  valuable 
and  childlike  faculty  has  very  likely  been  educated 
out  of  him  and  will  have  to  be  studiously  regained. 
But  no  method  of  regaining  it  is  comparable  with 
the  daily  endeavour  to  understand  and  to  satisfy 
the  mental  needs  of  the  young — especially  their 


THE  CREED  OF  FROEBEL  97 

fundamental  need  to  reconstruct  the  universe  for 
themselves. 

The  principles  of  Froebel  do  not  apply  only  to  the 
kindergarten,  though  it  was  in  this  elementary 
region  of  school  work  that  his  detailed  practice  was 
developed.  No  one  can  study  his  writings  under- 
standingly  without  realizing  that  he  shows  cause  for 
a  fundamental  change  from  our  prevailing  outlook 
upon  education.  It  is  not  a  soft  and  an  easy  path 
that  he  opens  up,  as  is  sometimes  supposed — either 
upon  hearsay  or  from  a  study  of  some  of  his  inter¬ 
preters,  who  give  only  a  nebulous  idea  of  education 
along  the  line  of  least  resistance.  It  is  a  way  that 
demands  steady  thought  and  courageous  self-dis¬ 
cipline  from  teacher  and  pupil  alike.  Based  upon 
originative  activity,  it  requires  the  working  of  the 
creative  human  spirit  for  every  step  of  advance.  It 
does  not  allow  of  the  easy  but  fallacious  "  progress  ” 
and  “  results  ”  dear  to  the  formalist  and  to  the 
ignorant  parent  :  progress  in  memorizing  rule  of 
thumb,  and  results  in  applying  rule  of  thumb  un- 
comprehendingly.  Every  step  is  a  real  step,  upon 
which  real  will  and  thought  and  feeling  have  been 
expended.  This  is  only  an  easy  way  in  that  it  is  an 
inspiring  way,  and  because  it  is  easier  to  work  hard 
under  a  true  inspiration  than  to  shirk  and  shuffle 
over  work  that  does  not  carry  the  heart  with  it. 

We  must  consider  in  the  next  chapter  the  un¬ 
doubted  fact  that  Froebel’s  way  is  not  everybody’s 
way,  and  that  a  common  and  a  highly  valuable  type 

H 


98  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

of  teacher  can  attain  to  Froebel’s  principles  only  by 
a  path  other  than  Froebel’s.  But  the  first  thing  to 
realize  is  what  Froebel’s  way  is  and  means.  It  is  not 
a  nursery  game,  preliminary  to  serious  education  ; 
it  is  education  as  serious  and  as  real  as  any  that  has 
been  conceived,  and  far  more  serious  and  real  than 
any  that  is  practised. 

The  mention  of  practice  brings  us  to  the  question 
why  Froebel’s  principles  are  not  in  common  use  out¬ 
side  the  region  of  the  kindergarten.  The  chief 
reason  appears  to  be  that  extraordinary  notion  of 
practicality  which  declines  to  test  any  principle 
until  someone  else  has  tested  it  first.  We  are  very 
prone  to  demand  of  a  theorist  that  he  shall  show  his 
theory  in  action  before  we  will  consent  to  examine 
it  even  as  a  theory  ;  and,  when  he  does  give  us  as 
complete  an  object-lesson  as  we  will  allow  him  to 
give  (for  we  usually  interfere  at  every  stage),  we 
make  little  effort  to  look  beyond  it  or  to  seek  in  it 
any  further  significance  than  is  upon  the  surface. 

No  one  says  to  an  architect,  "  Your  house  is  only 
built  on  paper ;  do  be  more  practical !  Get  your 
bricks  and  mortar  and  build  the  real  thing,  and  then 
we  will  see  whether  we  want  it  or  not.”  Yet  this  is 
what  we  say,  in  effect,  to  the  architect  of  an  educa¬ 
tional  system ;  and  Comenius  and  Froebel  set 
humbly  to  work  and  build  with  their  own  hands  as 
much  of  the  edifice  as  they  can.  The  world  then 
uses,  or  misuses,  a  small  proportion  of  what  they 
have  actually  built.  This  parallel  overstates  the 


THE  CREED  OF  FROEBEL 


99 


case  against  the  world,  because  a  building  can  be 
made  safe  by  obeying  known  mechanical  laws,  while 
educational  laws  are  less  surely  ascertained,  and 
their  discoverers  are  obliged  continually  to  test  them 
in  practice  ;  but  our  fault  is  to  look  only  at  the 
practice  and  to  let  the  law  escape  us — to  say 
“  Bricks  ;  and  mortar  ;  yes,  that  is  how  he  does  it. 
It  is  much  simpler  than  he  pretends.5'  To  use 
Froebel’s  kindergarten  bricks  is  not  necessarily  to 
build  according  to  Froebel’s  educational  plans  ;  and 
even  to  adopt  Froebel’s  actual  methods  with  full 
understanding  of  their  meaning  is  far  from  being 
the  whole  duty  of  his  successors.  He  planned  a 
greater  edifice  than  he  or  any  other  man  could  build 
alone  ;  of  that  greater  edifice  we  are  the  artisans, 
and  by  far  the  greater  part  of  the  workmanship 
is  for  us  to  contrive  after  a  careful  study  of  his 
drawings. 

We  have  attempted  no  detailed  analysis  of 
Froebel’s  methodology  ;  for  one  thing,  it  is  accessible 
in  his  own  words  and  in  those  of  many  able  interpreters 
and  commentators  ;  for  another,  it  was  devised  for 
his  own  time  and  people  and  is  only  partially  applic¬ 
able  to  ours.  It  sufficed  to  fill  a  Prussian  Govern¬ 
ment  with  panic  lest  Prussian  governors  might  find 
a  free,  self-determining  generation  upon  their  hands  ; 
it  was  publicly  suppressed  ;  and  with  more  Machia¬ 
vellian  insight  it  has  since  been  turned  by  Prussian 
Government  to  uses  that  Froebel  would  have  loathed 
from  the  bottom  of  his  soul.  In  any  case,  it  is  our 


100  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


business  to  sit  loose  to  methods  while  we  keep  firm 
hold  upon  tried  principles  ;  the  opposite  tendency 
is  the  bane  of  education.  Method,  like  law,  is  a 
matter  of  circumstance  and  expediency,  vitally 
important  for  us  to  reinvent  and  readjust,  not 
blindly  to  readopt.  Imagine  the  adoption  of  Froebel’s 
methodology,  cut  and  dried,  in  our  preparatory 
schools !  The  recognition  and  application  of  FroebeFs 
guiding  principles  would  be  a  very  different 
matter.  But  it  is  not  all  who  are  capable  of  learning 
to  subscribe  to  FroebeFs  faith  ;  and  for  the  doubters 
there  is  perhaps  more  to  be  learned  by  following  the 
strictly  logical  pathway  of  Herbart’s  tracing. 


X 


HERBART  AND  THE  EXACT 

METHOD 

TEACHERS  fall  under  a  rough  natural  classi¬ 
fication  that  divides  those  who  work  rather 
through  rule  than  through  sympathy  from  those 
whose  nature  it  is  to  put  sympathy  before  rule.  The 
ideal  teacher  would  combine  the  two  tendencies  in 
perfect  equipoise  ;  we  know  that  in  the  real  teacher 
a  predominant  strictness  can  go  with  a  delightful 
underlying  sympathy,  or  an  attitude  that  is  pre¬ 
dominantly  sympathetic  with  a  steady,  quiet  insist¬ 
ence  upon  ordered  method  ;  but  the  main  general¬ 
ization  holds  good  that  one  tendency  or  the  other  is 
usually  uppermost.  There  is  no  question,  apart 
from  personal  predilections,  of  the  one  being  better 
or  worse  than  the  other.  The  average  child’s  verdict 
betrays  no  choice  in  the  matter  :  he  would  rather 
be  taught  by  “  a  beast,  but  a  just  beast  ”  than  by  a 
cheerful,  easy-going  idler  ;  laxity  bores  him,  though 
he  prefers  a  method  that  is  lax  but  alive  to  an  aim¬ 
less,  illogical  severity.  The  method  which  gives  him 
the  sense  of  getting  something  done  is  the  method 
that  best  pleases  him  ;  and  different  teachers  have 

loi 


102  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


temperamentally  different  ways  of  evoking  the 
latent  vitality  of  a  class. 

The  way  of  Froebel  is  the  way  of  sympathy  ;  to 
be  fully  effective  it  demands  a  certain  intuitive 
meeting  of  minds  between  teacher  and  pupils  ;  it 
makes  mutual  understanding  prior  to  rule.  The 
way  of  Herbart  makes  rule  prior  to  understanding, 
even  as  the  Herbartian  psychology  makes  em¬ 
pirical  conceptions  prior  to  will  and  character.  It 
will  be  as  well  briefly  to  work  out  this  antithesis, 
since  it  is  fundamental  to  the  two  aspects  of  method 
with  which  we  are  continually  faced.  They  are 
co-ordinate  aspects  ;  neither  can  afford  to  dispense 
with  the  other  ;  we  are  simply  dealing  with  the 
fact  of  common  experience  that  teachers  approach 
methodology  from  the  one  side  or  from  the  other 
according  to  their  natural  bent  of  mind.  The 
teacher  to  whom  it  comes  naturally  to  start  with 
the  child’s  will  or  character  as  it  is,  and  to  make  this 
the  nucleus  and  the  criterion  of  the  material  sub¬ 
jected  to  the  child’s  mental  activity,  is  a  person 
endowed  with  an  instinctive  judgment  of  character 
that  does  not  form  part  of  everyone’s  natural  equip¬ 
ment.  Such  a  teacher  will  study  the  educational 
psychology  of  Herbart  with  keen  interest  in  that 
masterly  analysis  of  relations,  but  with  a  haunting 
wonder  that  Herbart  should  have  elected  to  work 
out  the  sequence  of  the  educational  process  exactly 
upside  down.  A  teacher  of  the  other  type  can  make 
little  of  Froebel’s  precept  that  he  should  begin  by 


HERBART  AND  THE  EXACT  METHOD  103 

realizing  the  child’s  potentialities  for  fruitful  activity 
and  then  adjust  both  matter  and  method  to  this 
realization,  because  the  realization  is  precisely  that 
which  he  finds  most  difficult  to  achieve,  and  the 
power  to  achieve  it  will  probably  be  among  the  last 
acquisitions  of  his  later  experience.  To  him  it  is 
Froebel  who  seems  to  be  putting  the  cart  before  the 
horse,  and  the  Herbartian  sequence  of  events 
appears  natural,  illuminating,  and  inevitable.  He 
asks,  “  What  shall  I  teach,  and  how  ?  ” — and 
Herbart  tells  him,  instead  of  instructing  him  to  gaze 
at  that  enigmatic  creature,  the  child,  and  find  out. 

But  then  the  troublesome  critic  steps  in  to  assure 
him  that  Herbart’s  view  of  mind  is  mechanical  and 
lifeless.  The  criticism  is  often  accepted  as  sufficient 
reason  for  Herbart’s  dismissal  from  the  region  of 
educational  ideals,  but  it  needs  examination.  There 
is  nothing  wrong  with  a  thought-mechanism  if  it 
can  be  shown  to  have  a  right  use.  If  it  can  also  be 
shown  to  have  a  use  that  is  for  many  people  indis¬ 
pensable,  its  claim  to  possess  vital  importance  when 
rightly  used  is  assured.  The  only  danger  for  the 
student  is  of  coming  to  think,  as  Herbart  himself 
certainly  tended  to  think,  that  a  mechanism  is  an 
explanation — that  a  thought-structure  which  gives 
a  framework  of  cognition  for  the  how  of  things 
must  also  automatically  account  for  the  why.  In 
Herbart’s  system,  presentation  is  the  primary  funda¬ 
mental.  The  whole  complex  of  mentality,  that 
blossoms  into  diverse  faculties  of  mind  and  different 


104  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

manifestations  of  will  and  character,  is  solely  a 
complex  of  inter-reacting  presentations.  It  is  right 
presentation,  in  co-ordinate  arrangement  and 
sequence,  that  creates  faculty,  will,  and  character. 
Mind  is  a  unity  in  diversity  of  developed  knowledge- 
cells,  as  body  is  of  physical  cells.  The  chicken  comes 
from  the  egg.  So  far  all  is  well.  The  trouble  begins 
when  the  logical  habit  of  the  Herbartian  thinker 
proceeds,  as  though  by  a  reflex  action  that  he  is 
powerless  to  control,  to  round  off  the  syllogism  by 
asserting  triumphantly  that  therefore  the  egg  does 
not  come  from  the  chicken. 

It  must  be  admitted  that  Herbart  led  the  way  in 
breaking  the  natural  circle  that  unites  his  educa¬ 
tional  philosophy  with  that  of  Froebel.  “  In  his 
psychology,”  says  Professor  Ward,  “  Herbart  rejects 
altogether  the  doctrine  of  mental  faculties  as  one 
refuted  by  his  metaphysics,  and  tries  to  show  that 
all  psychical  phenomena  whatever  result  from  the 
action  and  interaction  of  elementary  ideas  or  pre¬ 
sentations.”  It  is  perfectly  true  that  they  do  so 
result ;  the  error  lies  in  rejecting  the  correlative 
truth  that  presentations  in  their  turn  have  depended 
for  the  selection  and  apprehension  that  is  their  birth 
in  the  mind  upon  previously  developed  or  inherited 
faculties.  It  is  purely  a  question  of  personal  out¬ 
look,  as  we  have  tried  to  suggest,  which  truth  should 
be  taken  for  convenience  as  prior  to  the  other  ;  the 
thing  that  matters  is  that  the  teacher,  from  which¬ 
ever  side  of  the  circle  he  elects  to  start,  should 


HERBART  AND  THE  EXACT  METHOD  105 


eventually  work  round  to  the  other  side  and  to  a 
realization  of  the  whole. 

We  have  identified  the  personal  view  that  regards 
presentation  as  the  primary  art  of  teaching  with  the 
tendency  to  a  prevalent  strictness  in  method.  Let 
us  italicize  a  clause  in  Professor  Ward’s  paraphrase 
of  one  of  the  Herbartian  arguments  :  “If  we  were 
without  sensations,  i.e.  were  never  bound  against  our 
will  to  endure  the  persistence  of  a  presentation,  we 
should  never  know  what  being  is.”  This  is  a  fact  of 
life,  the  strict  teacher  very  truly  observes,  and  if 
education  is  training  for  life  it  must  be  made  a  fact 
of  education.  But  there  is  also  the  very  simple 
educational  fact  that  a  presentation  which  is  made 
to  persist  entirely  against  the  will  of  the  learner  is 
a  wholly  ineffective  presentation,  engendering 
nothing  but  distaste  for  the  subject  presented  and 
insensibility  to  its  attraction  and  value.  Froebel’s 
way  out  of  this  very  real  dilemma  is  to  enlist  the 
higher  will  of  the  learner  against  the  lower,  to  call 
in  the  child’s  innate  desire  for  originative  activity 
as  the  natural  ally  of  his  better  will,  and  to  present 
each  undertaking  in  such  a  way  that  the  child’s  best 
faculties  are  put  upon  their  mettle.  But  we  are  con¬ 
sidering  the  case  of  the  teacher  for  whom  this 
method  has  no  natural  appeal — who  does  not  possess 
as  an  instinct,  and  has  not  yet  learned  to  acquire, 
the  power  of  gauging  will  and  faculty  in  the  child, 
even  if  he  does  not  follow  Herbart  in  doubting 
whether  such  things  have  any  primary  existence. 


io6  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


It  is  no  use  asking  this  teacher  to  take  a  mental 
jump  into  the  void,  in  the  hope  of  landing  somewhere 
in  the  neighbourhood  of  Froebel’s  conception.  He 
has  to  proceed  step  by  step  round  the  circle  ;  and 
the  steps  that  Herbart  marks  out  are  invaluable, 
once  the  point  is  realized  at  which  Herbart,  alarmed 
at  his  own  manifest  approach  to  the  idea  of  creative 
will,  hurriedly  cuts  across  the  circle  in  order  to  get 
back  to  his  starting-point  with  his  preconceived 
theory  intact. 

The  side  of  the  educational  circle  that  represents 
exact  and  logical  method  was  perforce  left  some¬ 
what  undefined  by  Froebel.  He  handed  down  a 
methodology  detailed  enough  but  highly  empirical, 
and  capable  of  conscientious  use  without  a  trace  of 
inspiration  from  his  guiding  principles.  For  the 
teacher  of  the  true  Froebel  type,  not  the  merely 
“  Froebel-trained,”  an  intuitive  sympathy  con¬ 
tinually  transcends  method,  though  if  sympathy  is 
not  to  fall  into  sentimental  fallacies  the  more  he 
defines  his  method  the  better,  even  as  the  teacher 
for  whom  Herbart’s  systematic  scheme  is  not  only 
advisable  but  indispensable  must  also  study  to 
develop  the  factor  of  intuitive  sympathy  in  his  work. 
For  the  successive  stages  on  the  way  to  sympathetic 
understanding  Herbart  is  an  excellent  guide,  up  to 
the  point  where  he  takes  fright  at  the  spectre  of 
originative  Will.  Needless  to  say,  being  a  genuine 
educator,  he  implicitly  accepts  the  primary  function 
of  the  child’s  will  from  the  outset  ;  but  he  escapes 


HERBART  AND  THE  EXACT  METHOD  107 

an  explicit  admission  of  the  fact  by  reducing  will  to 
its  simplest  terms  and  calling  it  interest.  His  dis¬ 
cussion  of  interest  is  of  classic  importance  theoretic¬ 
ally,  and  of  the  highest  practical  value,  as  all  teachers 
know  who  have  submitted  themselves  to  its  fascina¬ 
tion.  Here  we  have  the  elaboration  of  the  primary 
motive  for  learning,  and  it  is  easy  to  see  that  this 
and  Froebel’s  enlistment  of  the  child’s  impulse  to 
activity  are  the  obverse  and  the  reverse  of  the  same 
sterling  coin.  But  what  of  Froebel’s  nucleus  for 
the  co-ordination  of  activity  and  knowledge  in  the 
freely  developing  nature  of  the  child  ?  The  answer 
may  be  put  in  the  form  that  Herbart’s  nucleus  is  in 
the  mind  of  the  teacher,  upon  whom  the  responsi¬ 
bility  devolves  of  thinking  out  the  connection  and 
the  vital  interrelation  between  all  branches  of  know¬ 
ledge,  and  of  so  presenting  these,  again,  as  to  engage 
the  keen  and  active  interest  of  the  pupil.  Thus 
Herbart  was  led  to  work  out  a  system  of  correlation 
which  should  be  a  model  for  every  teacher  to  emulate 
— not,  we  may  insist,  mechanically  to  adopt.  All 
teaching  must  be  originative  if  it  is  to  possess  a  live 
appeal,  even  regarded  solely  as  presentation.  The 
word  “  appeal  ”  brings  us  back  to  the  child’s  active, 
growing  receptivity — the  truer  nucleus,  to  Froebel’s 
way  of  thinking.  But  it  matters  little  whether  the 
vital  centre  be  regarded  as  having  its  seat  in  the 
mind  of  the  teacher  or  of  the  pupil  when  the  mind 
of  teacher  and  of  pupil  are  at  one  ;  and  it  is  to 
this  sympathy  that  the  comprehending  follower  of 


io8  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

Herbart  will  come,  and  by  a  way  of  reason  which, 
rightly  pursued,  leads  as  surely  to  education  in 
freedom  as  the  way  of  intuition. 

Indeed,  the  Herbartian  treatment  of  presentation 
is  in  one  respect  uniquely  necessary  for  training  in 
social  liberty.  There  is  one  aspect  of  education  for 
which  the  nucleus  must  be  in  the  teacher’s  mind 
before  it  can  be  transferred  to  the  child’s  :  that  in 
which  education  appears  as  the  handing  down  of  a 
progressively  self-enriching  tradition.  Professor 
Dewey,  a  fine  and  a  sincere  advocate  of  the  Rousseau- 
Pestalozzi-Froebel  school  of  educational  thought, 
has  put  forward  an  admirable  but  an  insufficient 
definition  of  education  as  a  process  by  which 
children  are  “  to  find  out  how  to  make  knowledge 
when  it  is  needed.”  The  present  writer  has  ventured 
the  criticism*  that  knowledge  is  a  thing  which  has 
to  be  preserved,  and  handed  down  through  the 
educational  system,  precisely  and  most  importantly 
when  it  is  not  “needed.”  Truth  is  not  always 
popular  ;  and  when  it  is  least  popular  it  must  be 
most  rigidly  conserved.  In  fact  we  cannot  have  a 
liberal  education  without  its  conservative  aspect. 
It  is  a  good  thing  to  do  away  with  false  and  lifeless 
traditions  ;  but  it  is  necessary  to  put  true  and  vital 
traditions  in  their  place.  Without  traditions,  educa¬ 
tion  slides  with  every  other  activity  of  man  into 
utilitarianism,  or  enslavement  to  things. 

Our  living  traditions  have  to  be  realized  by  the 

*  In  The  Westminster  Gazette ,  Aug.  5th,  1916. 


HERBART  AND  THE  EXACT  METHOD  109 

teacher  and  presented  to  the  child.  They  cannot  be 
evolved  out  of  the  child’s  inner  consciousness.  It 
is  essential  that  children  should  develop  a  social 
sense  of  their  own  in  schools  which  are  “  free 
republics  of  childhood,”  in  Froebel’s  phrase  ;  but  this 
is  not  the  end  of  the  matter.  They  have  to  realize 
the  best  social  traditions  of  their  age  and  of  the  ages 
before  ;  and  these  have  to  be  presented  to  them  so 
that  their  own  developing  social  sense  may  go  out 
to  welcome  the  presentation  ;  but  the  presentation 
itself  comes  to  them  from  without,  interpreted  by 
those  who  teach  them.  The  student  of  Froebel 
learns  how  to  prepare  the  actively,  not  passively 
recipient  mind  ;  the  student  of  Herbart  learns  how 
to  prepare  the  interpretation. 

While  we  are  upon  the  subject  of  the  Herbartian 
view  of  teaching  in  its  relation  to  tradition  it  may 
conveniently  be  added,  as  a  kind  of  footnote  to  this 
chapter,  that  bad  traditions  need  to  be  traced  in 
teaching  as  well  as  good,  for  their  example  and  warn¬ 
ing.  In  studying  educational  traditions,  the  teacher 
learns  by  observing  where  and  why  education  went 
wrong  ;  the  ebb  as  well  as  the  flow  of  right  ideals  has 
to  be  considered  if  the  outlook  is  to  be  complete. 
So  in  teaching  social  traditions,  the  errors  as  well  as 
the  inspirations  of  the  past  need  to  be  presented. 
To  take  the  gigantic  and  obvious  case,  we  have  all 
realized  the  need  of  teaching,  to  the  best  of  our 
powers,  what  has  been  the  essential  evil  of  Prus- 
sianism  and  how  it  developed.  Herbart  s  idea  of 


no  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


correlation  will  not  allow  us  to  make  our  explanation 
begin  and  end  with  Prussia  and  its  misdeeds.  The 
whole  principle  of  selfish  dominance  has  to  be  traced, 
wherever  we  can  find  it,  through  its  customary  rise 
into  a  false  glory  to  its  inevitable  collapse.  In  this 
way  we  may  so  present  the  chief  lesson  of  the  war 
that  it  may  be  a  lesson  for  the  future,  when  the  false 
ideal  of  dominance  has  to  be  detected  in  its  next  new 
guise — which  need  not  be  military.  This  is  a  single 
example  of  the  way  in  which  right  presentation  of 
subjects  may  be  made  an  essential  part  of  education 
for  social  liberty. 


XI 


SUMMARY 


HE  contrast  between  the  systems  of  Herbart 


1  and  of  Froebel  is  typical  of  an  agelong  differ¬ 
ence  of  outlook,  not  only  in  educational  thought  but 
in  all  thought.  It  might  be  very  broadly  defined  as 
the  conflict  in  the  mind  of  man  between  everything 
and  everything  else.  The  creator  of  a  logical  scheme 
such  as  that  of  Herbart  or  Locke  (for  Locke’s  system, 
though  patchy  in  detail,  was  coherent  enough  in* 
conception)  introduces  and  to  the  best  of  his  power 
co-ordinates  everything  that  he  can  see  to  be  true 
and  significant,  and  then  valiantly  and  rather 
pathetically  hopes  that  this  thought-mechanism  of 
his  creating  will  prove  to  be  all-inclusive,  that  its 
content  is  indeed  the  veritable  “everything.” 
Meanwhile  the  thinker  of  the  type  of  Froebel  or 
Comenius,  who  is  apt  in  thought,  like  Tweedledee 
in  action,  to  hit  everything  within  reach  whether 
he  can  see  it  or  not,  has  envisaged  a  less  coherent  but 
a  more  suggestive  system  in  which  are  entangled, 
if  seldom  permanently  captured,  some  of  the  elusive 
spiritual  factors  that  tantalize,  inspire,  and  finally 
evade  the  logical  interpreter.  The  invaluable  step 


hi 


H2  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

that  extends  and  formulates  anew  the  realized 
"  everything  ”  is  consolidated  only  to  raise  insight 
to  a  fresh  view-point,  from  which  fresh  demands 
ensue  on  behalf  of  the  “  everything  else/’ 

It  has  been  suggested  that  a  union  between  the 
systematic  and  the  idealistic  aspects  of  education 
must  be  our  aim,  or  at  least,  since  temperaments 
vary  fruitfully  in  their  outlook  upon  educational 
truth,  a  union  in  difference  between  naturally  diver¬ 
gent  views.  So  of  the  other  differing  types  of  educa¬ 
tional  outlook  upon  which  we  have  touched  in  our 
earlier  chapters.  Take  the  controversy  now  recru- 
descent  between  the  advocates  of  scientific  and  of 
literary  training.  Every  now  and  then  there  is 
audible  amid  the  din  of  disputation  a  quiet  voice 
suggesting  that  a  synthesis  of  the  two  is  what  we 
need,  such  a  synthesis  as  Comenius  hoped  might 
compose  the  strife  of  humanist  and  realist  three 
hundred  years  ago.  Greek  education  had  pointed 
the  way  long  before  in  a  system  that  united  the 
values  of  use  and  beauty,  and  the  neo-Hellenism  of 
the  Renaissance  had  revitalized  the  Greek  ideal  and 
given  it  continuity  in  change,  a  continuity  since 
broken  and  not  yet  restored.  Science  is  to-day  an 
activity  of  far  wider  and  more  complex  significance 
than  ever  it  has  been  before,  demanding  more  than 
ever  the  unification  with  the  other  activities  of  man 
that  Bacon  desired  for  it.  The  educator  who  doubts 
the  possibility  of  finding  a  place  for  science, 
thoroughly  studied,  in  co-ordination  with  the  classical 


SUMMARY 


ii3 

scheme  surely  needs  to  enquire  into  and  to  effect  a 
revaluation  of  the  synthetic  curriculum  of  Comenius 
or  Herbart.  Revaluation  is  essential ;  no  system 
comes  down  from  the  past  ready-made  to  our  hand  ; 
but  the  principle  comes  down,  changed  only  in  that 
it  is  intensified,  that  the  “  place  ”  of  the  scientific 
outlook  in  the  educational  scheme  is  everywhere, 
throughout  the  whole.  Like  all  the  major  attitudes 
of  the  mind,  the  scientific  attitude  either  pervades 
and  helps  the  rest  or  it  remains  in  dangerous 
isolation. 

Not  unconnected  with  this  antithesis  between 
science  and  the  humanities,  in  common  discussion 
if  not  in  reality,  is  the  opposition  between  facts  and 
ideas  as  units  of  the  educative  process,  with  the 
correlative  opposition  (since  faciendo  facta  patent) 
between  doing  and  thinking.  Probably  there  has 
never  been  a  time  when  a  smaller  proportion  of 
people  in  the  civilized  world  took  joy  and  pride  in 
the  work  of  their  hands  than  at  present.  Machinery, 
replacing  the  craftsman,  has  extruded  the  crafts¬ 
man’s  training  and  outlook  ;  and  the  vital  energies 
that  machinery  has  set  free  have  not  been  turned 
to  higher  expression  in  the  arts.  It  may  be  believed 
that  the  consequences  extend  over  the  entire  field 
of  human  development,  from  the  physical  region  in 
which  lack  of  co-ordination  between  mind  and 
muscle  has  an  adverse  effect  upon  both  bodily  and 
mental  poise,  to  the  region  of  character  in  which  the 
relation  between  right  thinking  and  right  doing  is 
1 


H4  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

deprived  of  a  valuable  elementary  stimulus  towards 
integration.  Froebel’s  recognition  of  the  issues  in¬ 
volved  was  far-reaching  enough  to  have  been  widely 
neglected  ;  and  though  the  educative  integration 
of  thought,  feeling,  and  action  demands  still  further 
study  and  research  we  must  wait  for  the  penetration 
of  Froebel’s  principle  of  activity  into  our  schools 
before  present-day  civilization  can  catch  even  a 
glimpse  of  the  secret  that  a  medieval  workman 
learned  unconsciously  in  his  apprenticeship. 

This  notion  of  spontaneous,  originative  activity, 
whether  we  see  it  in  the  craftsmanship-ideal  that 
produced  the  glories  of  Gothic  architecture  or  in  the 
somewhat  crude  methodology  that  gave  to  it,  in 
infantile  form,  its  first  consciously  articulate  ex¬ 
pression  in  the  original  kindergarten  of  Froebel,  is 
inevitably  connected  with  a  notion  of  freedom,  but 
of  a  freedom  that  can  be  called  free  only  in  terms  of 
its  harmony  with  social  control.  It  is  true  that  this 
social  liberty  can  only  come  about  through  the 
organic  self-reconstruction  of  our  social  order  ;  but 
it  is  an  extension  of  the  same  truth  to  add  that  self¬ 
reconstruction  can  only  be  effected  by  a  society 
whose  units  are  aware  of  the  liberty  in  union  which 
is  called  fellowship.  This  realization  can  be  made 
a  living  fact  in  our  schools ;  and  to  that  end  the 
question  can  be  made  a  touchstone  for  every  educa¬ 
tional  project  down  to  the  least  detail  of  method  : 
Does  this  actively  and  practically  conduce  to 
fellowship  in  work  ?  If  the  question  were  seriously 


SUMMARY 


115 

asked  and  answered  of  our  methods  as  they  are  we 
should  find  that  many  of  them  needed  recasting. 
We  might  do  worse  than  begin  with  the  unlovely 
process  by  which  a  main  incentive  towards  love  of 
knowledge  in  the  young  is  made  to  consist  in  their 
bidding  against  each  other  for  marks. 

Great  realizations  of  principle  are  built  up  by  co¬ 
ordinating  small  units  of  practice,  and  the  test  ques¬ 
tion  is  a  simple  and  a  useful  bit  of  mind-machinery 
for  bringing  practice  under  the  scrutiny  of  ideals. 
It  is  also  an  observed  fact  that  those  test  questions 
are  the  most  used  and  the  most  useful  which  the 
questioner  has  thought  out  and  formulated  for  him¬ 
self.  Those  which  have  been  adopted  from  another 
mind  lack  the  vitality  that  comes  of  personal  re¬ 
valuation,  and  if  we  suggest  a  few  more  it  is  in  the 
hope  that  others  will  improve  upon  them,  rather 
than  with  the  idea  of  providing  a  vade  mecum  in 
catechetical  form.  Every  mind  has  its  own  way  of 
analysing  and  recombining  ideas,  a  way  that  is  in  some 
small  sense  unique  and  irreplaceable  ;  this  truth  is 
indeed  a  major  argument  on  behalf  of  education 
through  free  development,  no  less  than  for  freedom 
to  think  and  plan  on  the  teacher’s  part.  Let  us  take 
the  idea  of  freedom  in  fellowship  into  the  further 
region  of  national  and  international  fellowship,  with 
which  our  minds  are  so  deeply  exercised  at  this  time. 
Again  a  test  question  can  be  applied.  Are  we  teach¬ 
ing  what  a  nation  is,  in  the  side  of  our  work  that 
treats  of  history  and  of  civics  ?  Are  we  eliciting  any 


ii6  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


ideal  of  the  mother-state,  such  as  the  Roman  child 
knew  ?  The  story  of  our  share  in  the  war  proves 
how  true  but  how  untaught  a  spirit  was  ready  to  be 
evoked  ;  and  the  tasks  of  peace  will  require  the 
teaching  of  a  very  much  better  prepared  lesson.  And 
while  we  consider  Roman  motherhood  and  the  Latin 
home  as  the  unit-realization  in  the  Roman’s  love  of 
country  we  may  ask  how  far  our  teaching  is  con¬ 
nected,  as  Pestalozzi’s  was  connected,  with  the 
actual  interests  of  home  and  locality  that  are  the 
natural  units  of  the  civic  sense  and  of  an  understand  - 
ing  patriotism.  To  teach  the  patriotism  that  com¬ 
bines  strength  in  national  self-maintenance  with  the 
principle  of  live  and  let  live  which  is  the  reduction 
to  its  simplest  terms  of  the  international  ideal,  we 
have  to  ask  how  far  we  have  remastered  the  lesson 
which  the  unsurpassed  prophets  of  Israel  taught, 
and  did  not  even  in  that  perpetually  warring  age 
teach  wholly  in  vain. 

It  is  often  said  that  when  the  present  war  between 
national  ideals  of  dominance  and  of  liberty  is  over, 
we  shall  be  faced  with  another  war,  less  sanguinary 
but  no  less  stern  and  unrelenting,  between  class- 
ideals.  Workers  resent  the  domination  of  industry 
by  the  power  of  capital  ;  masters  fear  the  domina¬ 
tion  of  industry  by  the  power  of  organized  labour  ; 
and  a  hold  upon  industry,  in  this  industrial  age, 
means  to  a  great  extent  a  hold  upon  politics. 
Whether  we  can  only  learn  industrial  sense  through 
the  tragedy  of  a  class  war,  waged  with  the  weapons 


SUMMARY 


ii  7 

of  starvation  and  of  waste,  or  whether  the  present 
complete  upsetting  of  old  compromises  will  be  dis¬ 
counted  by  the  new  fellowship  that  men  learn  when 
they  unite  for  a  common  purpose,  is  a  question  to 
be  left  to  those  who  care  to  prophesy.  The  business 
of  education  is  to  promote  the  cause  of  honourable 
peace  with  liberty,  no  less  between  classes  than 
between  nations. 

In  so  far  as  a  root  difference  of  outlook  between  a 
master-class  and  a  worker-class  is  due  to  education 
we  can  say  that  the  master-class  is  in  the  oligarchic 
tradition  of  Milton  and  of  Locke,  imperfectly  realized 
even  in  its  imperfection,  but  of  long  standing,  handed 
down  for  many  generations  in  our  public  school 
system  ;  while  the  workers  are  in  a  very  much 
vaguer  egalitarian  tradition,  the  dangerously  vague 
egalitarianism  of  Rousseau,  recently  made  saner  and 
safer  by  some  slight  addition  of  democratic  educa¬ 
tion  after  the  Pestalozzi-Froebel  example.  There 
is  not  only  a  diversity  but  a  division  between  the  one 
outlook  and  the  other  ;  all  industrial  history  shows 
the  root  cause  of  every  struggle  to  have  been  a 
failure  to  understand.  What  has  educational  history 
to  suggest  for  a  further  and  a  fuller  effort  to  promote 
understanding  ? 

We  have  seen  the  Miltonic  education  of  a  superior 
caste  in  the  light  of  the  universalism  of  Comenius, 
which  was  a  universalism  of  class  as  well  as  of  subject- 
matter.  Our  segregation  of  the  classes  in  youth 
obviously  has  its  disadvantages,  whatever  the 


n8  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


benefit  to  the  more  cultured  class,  and  there  is  hope, 
if  only  a  slowly  developing  hope,  in  our  gradual 
opening  of  the  doors  of  culture  to  the  elect  by  merit 
as  well  as  to  the  elect  by  wealth.  Meanwhile  the 
Comenian  universalism  of  mind,  coupled  with 
Froebel’s  doctrine  of  activity,  might  show  two  very 
salutary  results  in  our  young  elect  :  not  only 
increased  understanding  of  labour  problems  and  of 
the  largely  inarticulate  labour  ideal,  but  a  tendency 
to  that  keen,  active  helpfulness  which  would  make 
every  young  aristocrat  or  plutocrat  a  worker  by 
choice  and  preference.  Our  problem  will  be  im¬ 
mensely  simplified  as  we  succeed  in  eliminating  from 
it  the  contest  between  worker  and  non-worker  for 
the  good  things  of  life.  Indeed,  the  existence  in  it 
of  this  element  may  be  the  problem’s  main  difficulty. 
With  no  one  to  consider  in  the  State  but  workers 
of  different  grades,  understanding  each  other’s 
functions  and  their  dependence  upon  one  another,  the 
apportionment  of  opportunity  and  reward,  if  still 
a  matter  of  conflicting  claims,  could  be  worked  out 
upon  clear  principles  of  practical  justice. 

Meanwhile  the  Labour  ideal  has  not  to  be  sup¬ 
pressed — ideals,  suppressed,  run  underground  and 
breed  strange  and  violent  shapes  in  the  darkness — 
but  to  be  made  more  intelligent.  Labour  knows  life 
from  an  angle  of  experience  denied  to  the  master¬ 
class,  and  we  have  put  the  principle  into  effect  in 
our  State  that  the  criticism  of  Labour  should  be 
expressed  and  welcomed  ;  but  neither  the  expression 


SUMMARY 


119 

nor  the  welcome  has  come  up  to  our  more  sanguine 
hopes.  The  knowledge  which  is  the  basis  of  con¬ 
structive  criticism  is  lacking ;  and  destructive 
criticism,  however  one-sidedly  reasonable,  is  seldom 
welcomed  by  that  which  it  seeks  to  destroy.  Our 
elementary  and  State-secondary  schools  are  only 
very  tentatively  beginning  to  revalue  the  ideal  of 
Pestalozzi  and  to  train  that  understanding  of  con¬ 
ditions  and  their  causes  which  would  enable  those 
who  lack  liberty  to  make  their  appeal  articulate, 
united,  and  irresistible. 

The  curriculum  of  any  and  every  school  must 
surely  be  subjected  to  the  test-question,  How  far 
does  this  scheme  conduce  towards  knowledge  of 
social  conditions  ?  Failure  to  promote  this  know¬ 
ledge  is  not  only  a  mistake  but  a  disgrace  ;  and  our 
own  failure  would  be  an  inexplicable  disgrace  if  it 
were  not  that  we  fear  political  bias  on  the  part  of 
teachers,  and  for  this  reason  keep  the  entire  practical 
basis  of  politics  out  of  sight  of  education.  But  we 
can  see  a  way  out  of  the  dilemma  between  no  politics 
and  partisan  politics  in  the  teaching  that  consciously 
aims  at  the  promotion  of  mutual  understanding. 
For  the  teacher,  the  test-question  might  be  whether 
his  interpretation  of  the  facts  of  our  social  life  tends 
to  unite  or  to  divide  opinion.  If  the  teacher,  hold¬ 
ing  strong  social  and  political  views,  objects  that  it 
is  not  in  him  to  cry  peace  when  he  feels  that  there 
is  no  peace,  he  may  be  reminded  that  neither  is  it 
his  business  to  preach  social  war  in  the  classroom, 


120  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

as  is  so  often  done  by  underground  implication  under 
our  present  plan  of  having  no  open  teaching  of 
sociology  at  all.  In  any  case  the  unavoidable 
minimum  of  bias  can  do  less  harm  when  it  colours 
the  teaching  of  facts  than  when  it  prompts  the 
unconscious  communication  of  prejudices. 

The  reader  is  perhaps  returning  to  the  thought  of 
an  unmanageably  plethoric  curriculum.  As  this 
page  is  written  the  news  comes  that  one  of  our 
greater  public  schools  has  decided  to  introduce  the 
teaching  of  natural  science  throughout  its  classical 
side  ;  and  the  practical  parent  to  whom  notice  has 
been  sent  of  the  decision  has  promptly  expressed  his 
misgiving  lest  this  extension  of  range  may  weaken 
the  thoroughness  of  the  school’s  work.  If  a  place 
has  to  be  found  for  social  science  as  well,  can 
thoroughness  possibly  be  retained  ?  The  only 
answer  is  in  the  categorical  imperative  :  it  must  be 
retained  ;  and  not  only  retained,  but  increased. 
We  have  seen  that  the  problem  is  perennial ;  it  has 
had  to  be  solved  at  every  stage  of  educational  history 
and  it  has  to  be  solved  again  now.  The  means  of 
solution  are  the  same  now  as  they  have  always  been  : 
a  careful  cutting-out  of  dead  wood  (such  as  the 
memorizing,  forgetting,  and  rememorizing  of  Greek 
inflections  and  syntax,  or  of  mathematical  methods, 
by  children  still  too  young  to  master  them 
thoroughly)  ;  a  breaking-down  of  partitions  between 
cognate  subjects  (such  as  history  and  geography, 
geography  and  science,  science  and  mathematics), 


SUMMARY 


121 


so  as  to  save  wasteful  and  lifeless  work  due  to  over¬ 
lapping  (such  as  the  endless  working  out  of 
imaginary  mathematical  problems  while  science  and 
geography  present  endless  problems  that  are  real 
and  practically  interesting)  ;  and  a  positive  linking- 
up  of  subjects  so  that  they  may  pull  together  in  the 
mind  instead  of  aimlessly  jostling  one  another.* 

Even  this,  we  have  to  remember,  is  only  the 
“  everything  ”  of  education  ;  there  still  remains  the 
“  everything  else/’  Our  teaching  has  not  only  to 
be  so  ordered  that  the  mind  can  accommodate  the 
necessary  knowledge  of  to-day,  but  also  so  inspired 
that  the  mind  may  reach  out  through  knowledge  of 
facts  to  its  further  goal.  It  is  comforting  to  reflect 
that  those  of  the  great  educators,  or  of  the  educated 
peoples  of  the  past,  who  took  the  widest  range  of 
knowledge  for  the  province  of  education,  also 
reached  out  towards  the  highest  ideals  of  human 
life  and  conduct.  There  seems  to  be  little  fear  that 
extensive  knowledge,  if  it  is  not  of  the  dull  ency¬ 
clopaedic  order,  may  crowd  out  the  higher  faculties 
of  spirit ;  rather,  it  enriches  and  supports  them. 
To  unify  knowledge  is  to  create  ideals. 

There  is  one  test-question  which  we  continually 
apply  to  any  ideal,  with  so  unremitting  and  one¬ 
sided  an  emphasis,  indeed,  that  its  use  tends  some¬ 
what  to  become  an  unmeaning  reflex  action  of  the 

*  It  ought  to  be  added,  perhaps,  that  this  is  a  conclusion  drawn 
not  only  from  a  personal  interpretation  of  educational  history,  but  also 
from  the  experience  of  twelve  years’  practical  school  work. 


122  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


mind  :  the  question,  Is  it  practical  ?  If  we  as  con¬ 
sistently  asked  of  our  practice,  Is  it  ideal  ?  the 
answer  would  always  be  that  of  course  it  is  not  ; 
but  the  asking  of  the  question  would  be  a  stimulus 
towards  more  consistent  effort  to  make  our  practice 
as  nearly  ideal  as  our  limitations  allow.  And  the 
idealist,  in  education  as  in  anything  else,  has  as  good  a 
right  to  answer  that  of  course  his  ideal  is  not  practical ; 
it  would  not  be  an  ideal  if  it  were.  It  has  to  be  made 
practical ;  but  it  would  be  of  no  use  as  an  ideal 
unless  it  were  ahead  of  practice.  The  question,  “  Can 
it  be  made  practical  ?  ”  would  be  a  more  useful,  a 
more  sensible,  and  in  fact  a  more  practical  inquiry. 
And  the  attitude  of  mind  which  this  form  of  the 
question  would  imply,  an  attitude  of  open-minded 
readiness,  of  the  practical  mind  with  its  faculties 
marshalled  and  ordered,  seeking  new  worlds  to 
conquer,  comes  chiefly  of  a  wide  unity  of  knowledge. 
It  was  the  attitude  of  Comenius,  who,  preceded  by 
unpractical  dreamers,  took  up  their  dreams  and 
wove  them  into  noonday  fact. 

Further,  in  co-ordinating  the  practical  with  the 
ideal,  that  which  we  can  see  to  be  advisable  with  that 
which  we  can  feel  to  be  right,  we  have  another 
elementary  test-question  to  apply,  a  question  which 
the  practical  worker  and  the  idealist  are  apt  to  bandy 
with  one  another,  each  in  the  comfortable  conviction 
that  he  is  propounding  a  poser  :  the  question,  Is 
it  true  ?  Practice,  considered  as  apart  from  its 
ideal,  is  a  matter  of  expediency  only  ;  idealism, 


SUMMARY 


123 


considered  as  apart  from  its  practical  expression,  is 
a  matter  of  feeling  only — a  purely  aesthetic  function 
of  the  mind.  With  the  union  of  the  two  we  gain  a 
synthesis  of  immeasurable  value,  but  it  is  a  value  of 
which  Truth  still  has  her  question  to  ask.  Practical 
idealism  can  still  err  from  verity  in  acting  upon  a 
vision  of  what  cannot  be,  and  in  working  from  the 
world  not  as  it  is  but  as  it  seems.  Hellas,  predomi¬ 
nantly  ideal,  and  Rome,  predominantly  practical, 
both  fell ;  Germany,  once  the  home  of  a  fine  philo¬ 
sophic  idealism  and  till  lately  the  very  culmination 
of  the  practical,  has  fallen  into  as  terrible  a  truth- 
blindness  as  ever  punished  a  nation’s  sins.  Educa¬ 
tion,  of  all  the  works  of  man,  is  the  most  bound  and 
the  most  free  to  keep  an  unclouded  eye  upon  truth  ; 
the  most  bound  because  of  its  responsibility  for  the 
future,  and  the  most  free  because  the  uncramped 
mind  of  youth  offers  so  open  and  unlimited  a  field 
for  the  recognition  of  reality.  Reality,  temporal 
and  spiritual,  and  the  veridical  foresight  that  comes 
from  knowledge  of  reality,  is  a  part,  not  the  entire 
sum,  of  educational  principle  ;  but  is  it  not  the  part 
that  is  most  neglected  among  the  great  educational 
values  ?  This  is  a  question  of  sufficient  importance 
to  demand  a  concluding  chapter. 


XII 


CONCLUSION— EDUCATION  AND 

REALITY 

IN  The  Ultimate  Belief ,  a  book  that  should  have 
a  wide  influence  upon  educational  principle 
and  method,  Mr.  Clutton-Brock  has  challenged  this 
nation  as  having  neglected  to  teach  a  philosophy. 
Germany  developed  and  taught  a  bad  national 
philosophy,  the  philosophy  of  the  selfish  State,  for 
half  a  century,  and  it  was  not  until  Germany  had 
put  this  philosophy  into  practice  that  we  began  to 
open  our  eyes  to  the  fact.  If  we  had  possessed  a 
philosophy,  instead  of  despising  the  very  idea  of 
such  a  possession,  we  might  have  known  a  bad 
philosophy  when  we  saw  one — and  known  by  ex¬ 
perience  that  real  philosophies,  good  and  bad  alike, 
have  issue  not  only  in  fine-spun  theoretical  systems 
but  in  acts.  We  can  see  the  issue  of  the  Greek  philo¬ 
sophy  of  beauty  in  Greek  sculpture  and  the  Greek 
polity  ;  we  can  see  the  issue  of  the  earlier  Roman 
philosophy  of  practical  morals  in  the  Roman  filial 
devotion  and  the  Roman  law  ;  we  can  see  the  issue  of 
the  German  philosophy  of  Germanness  written  clear 
in  Flanders  and  France,  in  Serbia  and  Poland. 


124 


EDUCATION  AND  REALITY 


125 


What  is  our  own  implicit  scale  of  values,  if  the 
accusation  be  true  that  of  explicit  philosophy  we 
have  none  ? 

Of  the  human  spirit's  three  ultimate,  disinterested 
functions,  in  Mr.  Clutton-Brock’s  system — the 
idealistic  or  beauty-seeking,  the  practically  moral¬ 
istic  or  rule-seeking,  and  the  realistic  or  truth¬ 
seeking — we  have  suggested  that  the  third  suffers  the 
most  neglect  in  education.  It  has  begun  to  recover 
its  place  in  contemporary  thought ;  the  novel,  our 
civilization’s  characteristic  and  accepted  art-form, 
has  lately  found  for  realism  even  of  the  flattest  and 
most  unqualified  sort  a  surprising  popular  welcome  ; 
there  is  a  genuine  sense  afoot  that  we  are  not  good 
at  seeing  things  as  they  really  are,  with  its  corollary 
of  a  desire  to  see  more  truly.  Unconscious  humbug, 
which  is  lack  of  realistic  vision,  our  friendliest 
critics  still  declare  in  courteous  periphrases  to  be  our 
national  weakness.  Our  implicit  philosophy  has 
been  a  preference  for  feeling  rather  than  seeing  our 
way.  Undoubtedly  there  is  something  in  the  con¬ 
viction  which  is  growing  amongst  us  that  this  is  not 
the  whole  of  wisdom  for  an  organism  endowed  with 
eyes. 

If  the  vital  importance  of  reality  in  education  thus 
becomes  our  concluding  theme  it  is  not  from  any 
desire  to  set  Truth  above  idealism  or  practical 
morality.  Each  depends  at  every  step  upon  the 
other’s  progress  for  its  own.  But  education  has  to 
take  account  of  the  observed  fact,  now  creeping  into 


126  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

recognition,  that  our  ideals  and  our  practice  alike 
are  hampered  in  their  advance  by  lack  of  touch  with 
the  real.  To  demonstrate  the  fact  on  the  spot  we 
have  only  to  observe  that  the  preceding  sentence 
would  be  read  at  first  sight  by  many  people  in  a 
sense  that  would  make  “  the  real  ”  synonymous 
with  "  the  concrete  ”  or  even  “  the  material,”  so 
crude  is  as  yet  our  prevalent  conception  of  the 
reality  that  we  have  begun  to  seek.  It  is  also  very 
common  for  the  thought  of  reality  to  be  connected 
with  nothing  but  the  actualities  of  the  present 
moment.  But  it  is  a  false  realism  that  sees  that 
which  now  is  in  terms  of  itself  alone,  without  sense 
of  historical  perspective.  One  of  the  school  subjects 
that  stand  most  in  need  of  broad-mindedly  realist 
treatment  is  history,  usually  presented  in  so  ex¬ 
clusively  romantic  and  moralist  a  setting.  History 
teems  with  romance  and  with  morals  ;  but  the 
romance  is  a  matter  of  pasteboard  and  limelight, 
and  the  moralizing  stirs  nothing  higher  in  the 
learner  than  the  reflex  impulse  to  yawn,  unless  the 
history  is  made  real — as  it  is  made,  for  example,  in 
the  volumes  on  The  People  of  England  by  Mr. 
Stanley  Leathes.  A  sense  of  historical  reality  is 
vital  to  the  development  of  that  understanding 
foresight  which  Comenius  saw  to  be  one  of  the 
foundations  of  the  world’s  peace. 

We  have  dwelt  upon  the  close  touch  with  realities 
of  the  home  and  of  the  local  environment  whereby 
Pestalozzi’s  unsystematic  system  gained  so  incal- 


EDUCATION  AND  REALITY  127 

culably  in  value.  The  rise  and  increase  in  America 
of  schools  that  have  made  this  co-ordination  a 
guiding  principle,  described  in  Professor  and  Miss 
Dewey’s  book  Schools  of  To-morrow,  furnishes 
both  an  object-lesson  and  a  warning.  The  methods 
of  these  schools  are  worth  detailed  study  as  re¬ 
valuations  of  an  essential  principle,  but  the  contact 
with  reality  is  too  much  bounded  by  the  present  and 
the  concrete,  by  a  circle  too  narrowly  drawn  about 
a  centre  of  material  reward,  even  though  the  reward 
be  social  rather  than  individual  and  to  that  im¬ 
portant  extent  the  more  spiritualized.  Ourtreatment 
of  reality  has  to  be  ultimately  rooted  in  the  pure, 
disinterested  desire  for  truth  that  takes  other  rewards 
than  truth  itself  as  mere  incidentals.  It  is 
nevertheless  a  fact,  as  every  great  educator  of  the 
past  has  shown,  even  an  enthusiast  as  nebulous 
about  method  as  Rousseau,  that  the  way  to  pure 
truth  lies  through  the  concrete.  The  danger  lies  in 
wandering  so  aimlessly  into  the  concrete  region  as 
never  to  wander  out  again.  It  is  neither  in  this  way 
that  reality  is  found  nor  in  the  way  that  sets  stark, 
abstract  “  truths  ”  before  the  young  as  though  they 
would  be  comprehended,  unverified,  by  some 
sudden  leap  of  the  youthful  mind  into  the  experience 
of  maturity.  By  the  first  of  these  ways  a  child’s 
appetite  for  reality,  naturally  insatiable,  is  dulled 
by  a  diet  at  once  monotonous  and  rubbishy  ;  by 
the  second  the  young  mind  is  offered  its  food  in  a 
locked  box,  without  the  key,  and,  unless  it  is  of  the 


128  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

*  irrepressible  genius  ”  type  that  insists  upon  break¬ 
ing  locks,  soon  conies  neither  to  know  nor  care 
whether  there  is  food  within  or  not. 

But  what  is  the  essence  of  this  reality  that  educa¬ 
tion  has  to  teach  ?  The  inquiry  brings  us  uncom¬ 
fortably  near  to  the  question,  What  is  Truth  ?— for 
wrhich  we  have  no  recorded  answer,  nor  prospect  of 
finding  a  complete  answer  on  this  side  of  eternity. 
Retreating  from  the  enigma  of  all  philosophies,  let 
us  take  a  humbler  standpoint  of  inquiry  and  put  the 
question  from  a  different  angle.  How  does  reality 
grow  ?  In  what  manner  does  it  come  into  being  ? 
This,  after  all,  is  the  educator’s  problem.  If  our 
study  of  educational  principles  teaches  us  anything 
at  all  it  is  that  reality  is  the  integration  of  given 
units  of  fact ;  not  the  facts  themselves,  but  the 
asceitained  relations  in  which  they  stand  to  one 
another,  the  complex  of  actual,  co-ordinated  in¬ 
fluences,  observed  and  thought  together,  whereby 
facts  exist  in  and  through  one  another.  To  take  a 
simple  instance  from  nature  study,  a  flower’s  exist¬ 
ence  is  a  fact,  and  a  bee’s  existence  is  a  fact ;  both 
lacts  become  more  real  in  the  light  of  two  co-ordina¬ 
ting  facts — the  bee’s  dependence  upon  the  flower 
for  food,  and  the  flower’s  dependence  upon  the  bee 
for  the  reproduction  of  its  kind.  Similarly,  every 
co-ordination  of  fact  with  fact  is  an  access  of  reality  ; 
our  original  concepts  of  “  flower  ”  and  "  bee  ”  be¬ 
come  more  real  in  proportion  as  they  are  connected 
with  more  facts  about  flowers  and  bees  and  about 


EDUCATION  AND  REALITY 


129 


everything  related  to  them  ;  but  in  every  case  it  is 
the  new  relation,  not  the  new  fact,  that  is  the  incre¬ 
ment  of  reality.  The  new  fact  alone,  if  it  could  be 
conceived  as  entirely  alone,  would  add  nothing. 
But  in  much  instruction  the  most  painstaking  efforts 
are  made  to  present  facts  as  separate,  isolated  con¬ 
ceptions.  This  is  precisely  the  method  by  which  to 
make  teaching  unreal. 

The  antithesis  of  this  method  is  that  which  we 
have  described  as  the  synthetic  method.  Only  the 
name,  and  very  probably  not  even  that,  is  new.  It  is 
a  method  that  in  the  hands  of  Comenius  or  Pestalozzi, 
of  Froebel  or  Herbart,  diversely  interpreted, 
has  given  a  uniform  result.  The  result  has  been 
knowledge  of  reality,  attained  by  following  the 
single  principle  that  relations,  though  they  depend 
on  facts,  are  more  important  than  facts.  “  Take 
a  bone  from  a  dog  ;  what  remains  ?  ”  asks  the  Red 
Queen.  It  is  the  dog’s  temper  that  remains — a 
reality  of  greater  import  to  the  taker  of  the  bone 
than  anything  else  in  the  situation.  Take  Belgium 
from  the  Belgians  ;  what  remains  ?  Not  only  the 
magnificent  temper  of  those  who  stayed  the  German 
vanguard  at  Liege,  but  a  reality  of  world-wide 
indignation  that  Prussia,  once  the  suppressor  of 
Froebel’s  education  in  freedom,  had  been  powerless 
to  foresee.  It  is  the  reality,  the  soul  of  the  facts,  that 
matters  ;  and  all  reality  is  built  up,  within  the  mind 
as  without  it,  from  small  beginnings  in  the  gradual 
growing  together  of  relations.  That  the  educator 

K. 


130  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

must  view  relations  widely  as  well  as  correlate  them 
closely  is  a  principle  which  the  diverse  experience 
of  the  past,  in  success  or  failure,  sufficiently  shows 
forth  ;  the  development  of  the  widest  synthesis  of 
relations  is  the  evolution  of  the  richest  and  the  most 
trustworthy  reality. 

It  is  a  truism  to  say  that  the  sins  and  the  horrors 
of  our  civilization  are  chiefly  due,  not  to  a  prevailing 
fondness  for  what  is  wrong  and  horrible,  but  to  a 
prevailing  lack  of  realization.  Everyone  knows, 
for  instance,  that  slum-life  ought  not  to  be  ;  every¬ 
one  feels  that  it  is  hideous  ;  very  few  people  fully 
realize  that  it  is  one  of  the  lies  of  civilization,  a  fact 
which  convicts  our  morals  and  our  good  taste  of  a 
fundamental  insincerity.  Our  ways  of  thought  are 
too  moral  and  too  tasteful  not  to  shrink  from  the 
truth  about  the  slums  and  about  civilized  peoples 
who  allow  slums  to  exist.  But  this  is  not  to  say  that 
we  have  too  much  morality  or  good  taste.  We  have 
too  little  ;  because  we  have  still  less  love  of  the 
truth  for  its  own  sake.  Let  us  pursue  this  instance 
further  by  inquiring  why  the  slums  have  not  been  to 
us  all,  as  the  war  is,  a  haunting  horror,  continually 
at  the  back  of  the  mind,  that  cries  shame  upon  our 
civilization  even  while  it  calls  for  glories  of  devotion 
and  of  sacrifice  to  qualify  the  shame. 

We  have  been  taught  to  see  our  social  life,  and  the 
life  of  man  in  general,  as  an  agglomeration  of  facts  ; 
we  have  been  compelled  to  see  the  war  as  a  complex 
of  relations.  The  war  strikes  at  our  personal 


EDUCATION  AND  REALITY  131 

interests  from  one  unexpected  quarter  after  another ; 
it  wakes  us  up  to  our  intricate  dependence  upon  each 
other  as  our  peace-time  education  never  began  to 
wake  us  up.  Every  relation,  important  to  a  people 
in  arms,  between  man  and  man,  between  one 
activity  and  another,  has  had  to  be  hurriedly, 
urgently,  imperfectly  drummed  into  our  intelligence 
as  a  matter  of  immediate,  vital  necessity.  Peace 
taught  us  facts,  unrelated  ;  war  has  compelled  us  to 
go  back  and  recognize  some  of  the  more  elementary 
relations  that  constitute  reality.  Perhaps  war 
will  always  be  necessary  so  long  as  we  allow  facts  to 
lie  to  us,  and  even  welcome  every  comforting  lie  that 
saves  us  from  the  pains  of  thought. 

Slum-life,  our  particular  instance,  is  a  fact ;  seen 
in  its  relation  to  other  facts  it  proves  itself  more 
destructive  of  human  values  than  any  war.  What 
proportion  of  our  war  expenditure  in  money,  energy, 
and  thought  would  have  abolished  it  ?  There  seems 
no  reason  why  it  should  not  have  been  done  away 
with,  except  that  it  was  not  a  reality  to  us. 

Why  was  it  not  a  reality,  while  war  is  a  reality  ? 
Evolution  has  its  reply  that  courage  is  older  than 
either  compassion  or  social  wisdom,  and  that  the  call 
to  valour  is  a  call  to  the  more  primitive  complex  of 
instincts.  We  can  always  be  roused  to  face  an 
issue,  great  or  small,  when  there  is  to  be  a  fight 
about  it.  Education  has  not  yet  made  good  its 
rejoinder  that  the  arts  of  peace  need  courage,  and 
even  a  certain  fine  pugnacity,  no  less  than  the  ait 


132  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

of  war.  The  valour  of  Lord  French,  between  Mons 
and  the  Marne,  is  equalled  by  the  valour  of  his 
sister,  Mrs.  Despard,  in  the  East  End  of  London. 
But  we  do  little  in  our  teaching  to  voice  the  call  of 
social  facts  for  this  pacific  valour.  Both  courage 
and  compassion  are  ready  to  be  called  in  aid  of  a 
truer  civilization,  but  the  call  is  too  seldom  made 
to  ring  clear.  It  is  less  a  call  than  a  conflicting 
medley  of  half-muffled  cries. 

We  teach  facts,  though  not  widely  enough  ;  and 
we  teach  many  and  diverse  ideas  about  the  facts, 
but  without  the  unity  that  comes  of  tracing  their 
relation  to  one  another.  Facts  are  bound  to  one 
another  in  an  orderly  network  of  relations  ;  and 
unrelated  ideas  are  loose  ends  which  we  have  failed 
to  join  up,  leaving  gaps  in  the  network.  If  we  leave 
enough  of  these  loose  ends  hanging,  our  network 
becomes  a  mere  tangle.  In  this  tangle  the  best  that 
we  can  do  is  painfully  to  unravel  one  thread  at  a 
time  ;  and  it  is  characteristic  of  the  ill-educated 
mind  to  be  able  to  hold  only  one  idea  at  a  time.  To 
take  a  simple  instance  from  the  war,  we  found  our¬ 
selves  able  to  think  of  men,  or  of  munitions,  or  of 
money  ;  it  took  a  year  to  persuade  us  that  it  was 
imperatively  necessary  to  think  of  all  three,  and  to 
think  of  them  in  relation  to  one  another. 

Our  final  suggestion  is,  then,  that  synthetic 
method,  or  the  orderly  building  together  of  relations, 
is  the  way  of  reality  ;  and  that  reality  is  the  goal 
which  we  have  chiefly  failed  to  seek.  If  any  reader 


EDUCATION  AND  REALITY 


133 


would  set  against  this  view  the  great  text,  “  Seek 
ye  first  the  kingdom  of  God  and  His  righteousness,” 
the  reply  of  all  true  education  through  the  ages  is 
that  the  kingdom  of  truth  is  the  place  where  right¬ 
eousness  dwells,  and  that  the  Unseen  will  remain 
unseen  by  those  who  search  in  an  unreal  world.  It 
is  the  real  world  that  education  has  to  help  towards 
becoming  an  ideal  world  ;  and  it  is  in  our  relations  to 
the  real  world  that  we  have  to  develop  and  express 
our  idea  of  goodness.  In  so  far  as  our  conception  of 
reality  is  in  a  tangle  we  are  the  less  able  either  to 
form  good  ideals  or  to  be  good. 

The  unclouded  reality  of  which  we  are  in  search 
is  spiritual ;  but  it  is  much  easier  to  talk  of  spiritual 
reality  than  to  say  what  we  mean  by  it.  We  cannot 
say  what  Truth  is,  ultimately,  unless  indeed  we  call 
it  the  union  of  all  the  relations  that  there  are 
between  all  the  facts  of  the  universe — which  is  only 
another  way  of  declaring  our  ignorance.  But  it  is  a 
definition  of  the  nature  of  our  ignorance  which 
perhaps  points  the  way  to  knowledge  ;  and  in  the 
works  of  the  greatest  educators  we  see  combined  a 
positively  cosmic  conception  of  knowledge  and  an 
infinite  patience  in  teaching  small  hands  to  weave 
together  the  threads  of  the  gigantic  fabric. 

Such  realism  is  not  that  which  was  once  opposed 
— though  artificially  opposed,  as  we  have  seen — to 
the  predominantly  aesthetico-moral  system  then 
known  as  humanism  ;  it  has  no  quarrel  with  anyone 
but  the  most  lifeless  of  formalists ;  but  in  case  the 


134  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 

neo-humanists  have  a  bone  to  pick  with  our 
insistence  upon  reality  let  us  hasten  to  make  the 
amende  honorable  before  the  contest  is  engaged.  We 
have  been  considering  under  the  guise  of  reality, 
or  of  truth,  that  which  is  also  beauty  at  its  loveliest 
and  morality  at  its  loftiest.  Beauty  is  the  exquisite 
harmony  of  relations  ;  so  is  truth.  Goodness  is  the 
splendid  spirit  that  seeks  in  the  union  of  relations 
the  freedom  of  the  soul ;  so  is  truth.  The  three  are 
one.  Still,  of  the  three,  it  seems  to  be  chiefly  truth 
that  has  been  starved  and  left,  famishing,  to  lag 
behind;  and  for  this  reason  truth,  or  the  reality  that 
is  the  food  and  the  substance  of  truth,  has  been  made 
the  dominant  note  of  this  concluding  study  in 
educational  values.  Those  who  would  prefer  the 
co-ordinate,  not  countervailing  claims  of  character 
and  feeling  are  more  than  welcome  to  amend  any 
thoughts  of  educational  reconstruction  that  these 
cursory  chapters  may  have  suggested. 


INDEX 


Activity,  92,  95-96,  114 
Alcuin  and  Charlemagne,  18 
Aristotle’s  ideal  man  a  “  su¬ 
perior  person,”  xv 
Ascham,  27 

Authority  of  the  teacher, 
84-87 

Bacon,  Francis,  28-29 

Charlemagne,  17 
Chivalry,  17 
Christianity,  xvi,  21 
Civics  and  politics  in  educa¬ 
tion,  1 15 

Class-separation  and  class- 
fusion,  53  et  seq. 

Class  war,  116 
Classicism,  23-24 
Classics  and  science,  24-25, 
112 

Comenius  :  and  mother-train-  j 
ing,  34  ;  and  the  curriculum,  I 
36-37  et  seq.  ;  two  points  ! 
in  his  method,  42  et  seq.  ; 
and  Milton,  47—49  et  seq. 
Also  59-60,  79,  89-90,  92, 
95,  112,  117,  122 
Correlation,  44,  66 
Craftsmanship,  18-20,  113 
Curriculum  must  always  be 
capable  of  expansion,  29-33, 
120 

Educators  as  rebels,  xi 
Encyclopaedism,  36,  39 
Equality,  xx 
Erasmus,  25 


Fellowship,  xviii,  93,  114,  115 
Foresight,  43 

Formalism,  post-Renaissance, 
25-26 

Freedom,  xix,  60,  63,  71  et  seq., 
83,  114,  115 

Froebel :  his  two  prior  as¬ 
sumptions,  89-90  ;  associa¬ 
tion  with  Pestalozzi,  90-91  ; 
his  system  not  a  nursery 
game,  97  ;  Prussian  an¬ 
tagonism,  99.  Also  xix,  84, 

106 

Gothic  architecture,  18 
“  Gourd-bottle  education,”  68, 
7°~71 

Greek  and  Latin  as  subjects 
that  confer  status,  xvii 
Greek  education,  xv,  6 
“  Gymnastic  ”  view  of  educa¬ 
tion,  89 

Hellenism,  6-9 

Herbart :  his  system  comple¬ 
mentary  to  that  of  Froebel, 

107  ;  valve  of  presentation. 
108.  Also  m 

History,  115,  126 
Humanists,  sixteenth  century, 
ch.  Ill,  passim 

Interest,  96,  107 

Jews,  xiv,  4,  1 16 

Liberty,  see  Freedom 


136  PERMANENT  VALUES  IN  EDUCATION 


Local  interests  should  be 
brought  out  in  education, 
81-82,  116 

Locke  :  tradition  and  freedom, 
58-63  ;  philosophic  realism, 

64- 65  ;  his  sketch  of  method, 

65- 67 

Marcus  Aurelius,  xv-xvi 
Melanchthon,  25 
Milton  :  and  Comenius,  47-49 ; 

Tractate  of  Education,  49-52 
Montaigne,  26 
Morris,  19 

Motherhood,  Roman,  13.  Re¬ 
interpreted  in  worship,  17  ; 
by  Pestalozzi,  80.  Also  116 
Mulcaster,  27 

Nationalism,  93,  115 

Parents  and  schoolmasters,  xii 
Persians,  xiv,  5-6 
Personality  of  the  teacher 
should  be  kept  in  the  back¬ 
ground,  84,  96 

Pestalozzi :  Leonard  and  Ger¬ 
trude,  80  ;  his  educational 
precepts,  83  et  seq.  Also 
xviii,  xx,  77 

Political  education,  53,  119 
Preparedness  for  war,  3 
Presentation,  108-109 
Prussianism,  4,  99,  109,  123, 
124 

Rabelais,  26 

Realists,  sixteenth  century, 
ch.  Ill,  passim 
Reality — its  nature — 128  et  seq. 


“  Results,”  97 

Roman  imperial  education  in¬ 
creasingly  pedantic,  xv 
Rome,  12 

Rousseau  :  as  humanitarian, 
69  ;  his  conception  of  free¬ 
dom,  71  et  seq.  ;  his  in¬ 
fluence,  78  ;  Emile,  77,  78. 
Also  12,  63 

Science :  Vives’s  timorous 

advocacy,  27 ;  Bacon  on 
study  of  nature,  28-29  I 
Locke,  66 

Science  and  classics,  24-25, 
112 

Self-forgetfulness  an  end  in 
education,  xviii 
Slavery,  Greek,  11 
Slavery  to  status,  xix 
Slums,  130  et  seq. 

Social  conditions  should  be 
studied  in  schools,  119 
Social  control,  76,  93,  114 
Status  a  wrong  aim  in  educa¬ 
tion,  xiv,  et  seq. 

Stoics,  xvi,  6 
Sturm,  26 

Sympathy  and  rule,  10 1 
Synthetic  method,  50,  91,  112, 
120-121,  129,  132 

Vives,  27,  28 
Vittorius,  25,  26 

War  enforces  some  elementary 
sense  of  relation,  130 

Xenophon  on  Persian  educa¬ 
tion,  xiv,  5 


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